


Speak of the Devil

by indiachick



Category: Supernatural
Genre: BAMF Sam Winchester, Biker Sam, Dark Dean Winchester, Horror, Hurt Sam Winchester, M/M, Mildly Dubious Consent, Non-Linear Narrative, Post-Apocalypse, Sam Winchester Big Bang 2016, Sam Winchester's Demonic Powers, Sam Winchester-centric, Season 11 au, The Darkness is Scary Manipulative, The Devil is a Sneaky Bastard
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-11
Updated: 2016-03-11
Packaged: 2018-05-26 02:18:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 21,456
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6219736
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/indiachick/pseuds/indiachick
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s been ten years since Sam met with Lucifer to discuss about the Darkness. Ten years since Amara declared war on Earth. Ten years since Dean vanished. A deal with Lucifer, a bunch of Castiel’s acolytes, and a motorbike is all the help that Sam has had in going against the Darkness.</p><p>Now, his deal is up, and the Devil wants him to re-negotiate. Castiel wants him to make a delivery that’ll have him riding through a wasteland of fire and radiation. The Darkness wants to get her claws in him. And Dean…well, there’s the million dollar question.</p><p>The one thing Sam knows: it’s gonna be a hell of a ride.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Road

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the sammybigbang 2016. With [absolutely MAJESTIC art by amberdreams](http://amberdreams.livejournal.com/394550.html) and a whole lot of self-indulgence. 
> 
> Have fun! :)

** **

 

**0 HOURS**

**TONOPAH, NEVADA**

Nobody knows much about the beginning but in the end it’s just the same as it’s got to be—the Winchester boys with their guns hungry for each other.

 

No one’s got seconds, unless you count for the moon in the sky behind one and the setting sun behind another, halos like saints in Diamante paintings _._ No one’s signed a contract, either. That figures; when the world’s winding down, busted up, springs torn out and past the jurisdiction of a repair manual, the rules have got to go for a toss.

 

They count off their paces, clocks for their hearts, and you know if you know them: no one’s likelier to be a quicker draw. Try the Baye’s theorem or all your predicative logic—you don’t want to gamble on this one. Trained in the same places by the same men and monsters, tried and tested on Earth, Hell and Heaven, they’re as fair a match as you’d ever see, and that’s worth buying a drink at _The Best Western_ , if not two.

 

It feels like even the dust is holding its breath. The wind picks up and it smells of rain. In the distance, lightning cuts sourceless in the sky.

 

If you look closer though, their shadows fall strange on the black dirt. Something slicker and older than just two worn men. Something wounded.

 

But it doesn’t matter anymore.

 

Whatever is east is hungry. Whatever is west is dead.

 

And there’s just the shootout now, at the end of the world.

 

***

 

**12 HOURS**

**TUCSON, ARIZONA**

Here’s how it begins: Sam sits with himself in _The Barking Deer_ , the only pub for miles out, nursing a beer brewed black as tar. Outside is a sunset baked in layers like radioactive wedding cake. The yellow of it spills through thick windows, diffracts against the crystal teardrops of the broken chandelier, lends the slick shine of nostalgia to worn surfaces and scratchy speakers playing _Kashmir_. The whole thing has the aesthetics of Sam’s remembered Heaven, except there’s the TV that speaks in hushed tones about increasing radiation poisoning, and the barkeep (Blake Papadakis; twenty-six) washing the same glass over and over again.

She’s from New Mexico, she tells him. Her Dad was a hoarder, he spent all of his life worrying the world was gonna run out of milk. In the end, it was the sharp end of a wine-bottle that severed his brain-stem, two days before the bombs. She’s got his jacket on, see?

Sam saw only tarnished military medals, torn lining. It made him buy a salad even though he wasn’t hungry, even though the Devil laughed at him. It came limp and soggy, primarily choked with beetroot. Squint and maybe the vegetables would glow with radiation.

It sits untouched on his table, and Blake doesn’t mind. She’ll serve some other passenger the same thing. She’s resourceful, like that.

Sam drinks, though. The ice melts in his glass and sweats out into the wood. His fingers feel the freeze despite the leather gloves.

 The Acolytes are late again.

“Is it true,” asks Blake Papadakis, haltingly, pink glass in her hair and raw knuckles wincing under water, “that the bike that you drive runs on demonic magic and thinks for itself?”

Sam looks up and shrugs. He can see the Triumph from here, gleaming black in the orange light, asleep like a predatory cat dozing in the sun.

“Is it true,” asks Blake, when she’s sure he isn’t giving her good enough answers to her first question, “that you’ve drank from the Devil’s own table? I heard it was scotch and that it burned like souls in Hell.”

Sam sighs, stretching in his chair like a cat. His spine pops, soft muffled sound like stones against cotton. “Seriously, Blake. Where do you get all this from?”

“Men tell stories,” Blake says, shrugging a thin shoulder., “Is it true that before all this— the bombs and angels and the Darkness—that you had a living, fire-breathing car black as starless space?”

“By _fire-breathing_ if you mean gas-guzzling, then yes. And I don’t know about _starless space_ ,” Sam says, evenly. What the fuck kind of simile was that, anyway? He plays with a coin he found on the table, spinning it around and around, and when it falls flat to reveal heads he says, as if he’s lost the contest, “It was my brother’s car.”

“Where is it now?”

“I don’t know.”

“And you killed monsters, saved people.”

“We tried.”

Blake hums thoughtfully, turning the glass around in her hand. She could’ve been pretty if the world had been kinder to her. Sam watches her brow furrow, forming her next question.

 “Where’s your brother now?”

Sam’s saved from answering by the door swinging open on squeaking hinges, spitting in two blue-robed women wearing goggles. They carry a duffel bag between them, careening sideways with the weight, weaving between empty tables and towards him. One of them is a redhead with her hair in a long, dirty braid. The other’s got no hair, no eyebrows, nothing but smooth pink scars, though her eyes shine bright blue from her fire-marked, hairless face.

“Sam Winchester?” the hairless one asks, unnecessarily.

“Shut up, Julia, who the fuck else can he be?” says the redhead.

They heave the bag onto the table; the crash of it is resounding.

“It has to go to Carson City.”

Sam barks out a laugh. “Nevada is a death-trap. I have a message for Cas: _fuck you_.”

The women look at each other.

 “He can’t take messages right now.”

“Why, where is he? China?”

“La Paz, actually,” says the hairless one— _Julia,_ Sam reminds himself, “He told us to give _you_ a message.”

“Well then, maybe he should have come himself.”

The redhead frowns. “He said that could cause a security issue. I don’t know what he meant—”

“Yeah, that sounds like him,” Sam mutters. Always with the excuses. Sam’s not sure when’s the last time he and Cas met each other, face to face. Two years? Three? “What’s the message?”           

Julia and the redhead exchange a glance.  “ _Please.”_

Sam blinks. “Please what?”

“Just that. _Please_.”

Sam leans back in his chair. “Grace?” he asks, pointing to the bag.

The redhead nods, a grimace lighting up her face. “There’s something else he wanted us to tell you.”

“If it’s a prayer, you can keep it to yourselves. Maybe you’ll sleep easier on your road back.”

“It’s not a prayer,” says Julia. They’re both gleaming with sweat, red dust on their faces like war paint. “He said to tell you that your ten years are up tomorrow.”

Ten years.

 _Ah,_ says Lucifer in his head. _We’ll need to have a talk about that, Sammy._

Sam tries to keep his face carefully neutral, but he must fail, because the redhead leans forward, curiosity reeking from her pores. “What does that mean?”

Sam stands and hoists the bag onto his shoulder. The Acolytes are curious and dangerous—give them an angel blade and they can fight as well as he and Dean ever could: maybe better. They’re faster, smarter; they’ve got everything from demonology to eschatological theologies down pat, and they’re not limited by Judeo-Christian systems. Sam had insisted on that. Julia or the redhead could be well-versed in cyber-Shintoism, for one, or neo-Hinduism, or some mongrel hybrid of druidic-Gnosticism. The first thing he and Castiel ever told them to do was to _research_ , after all. It’s that incisive intelligence born out of endless learning that Sam sees in the redhead when she looks at him.

“Was it a deal? Devil at the crossroads, souls up for grabs—that sort of thing?”

“I mean,” says Julia, “Everyone’s head stories about the Winchesters. You’re practically a legend.”

Something stirs at the back of his mind. Memories. Days when crossroads and soul-transactions were still options, and everything they did wasn’t a crank at some seismic lever.

“It means the Devil’s gonna be fresh out of transmission bandwidth to my head,” Sam says, strapping on his helmet, “and he’s gonna try to pay higher mortgage so he gets to stay.”

“The Devil—like, Lucifer?”

Behind them, Blake drops the glass she’s been washing into the full sink.

Sam shrugs. “Maybe you should brush up on the _legends_ section.”

The women blink in surprise.

 “If you talk to him in Bolivia, tell Cas I’ll have the bag in Carson City in twelve hours.”

**8 HOURS**

**BOULDER CITY, NEVADA**

The Audiobooks that Sam listens to on his rides are years and years old—the last New York Bestseller list came out a decade ago, after all. This one never made a Bestseller List, not even on Amazon, but it’s got a trash-talking androgyne and space shuttles and the hopeful discovery of an inhabitable planet, and for the short stretch of road from Tucson to Phoenix he doesn’t think of the heat, the glowing dust or the Devil.

Dad, though. Strangely enough, the captain of the ship traversing unchartered space sounds like his Dad. Sam finds himself thinking unwittingly of taking these same roads in the Impala, forever ago. His head pressed to the window, watching town after town go by in dust and red rock while Dean hummed along to _Eric and the Animals_ and hunger gnawed at Sam’s stomach and sweat pooled at the base of his neck. Maybe Sam’s memories have started to fray, because these look like bright baubles of vintage film designed to evoke maybe romanticism, or at the very least a strange sense of melancholy.

At the time, all he remembers feeling was anger.

Mostly, that was all he remembered feeling from the age of thirteen all the way until his first jump into Hell at…what was it, twenty-six? Brief contentment, grief, odd morsels of happiness with Dean—but mostly anger. And then the Devil had found that anger, stashed away like a child would the sweetest cut of meat, and he had gobbled it all up.

If he’d told this story back at _The Barking Deer_ , Blake would have looked at him with the wide-eyed gaze of a child hearing a fireside fairy tale.

A slither in his skin; a ripple at his shoulder.

Lucifer laughs in his ear.

_Lend me your ears, partner. We need to talk._

“Shut up,” says Sam, automatically, touching the throttle to make the bike push faster.

The last vestiges of dusk slip into his bones with a rare coolness and he puts Blake out of his mind forcibly. The Devil, the Darkness, the Acolytes—all out.

Here in this dying light, lost in motion, pale in the light of a rising moon and wrapped in a fog of toxic dust, there is no room for anything but instinct, and speed, and the need to keep going.

The Triumph has never failed him. In that first year of the Darkness after Dean disappeared, when it had all been chaos, Sam had stolen cars and even a truck where he could. He’d wandered through towns ravaged by angels touched by the Darkness, winning impossible fights against their true-forms, looking everywhere for his brother. Nothing he’d driven had felt like the Impala. And cars were slow—against the Darkness and the rogue angels and the air-strikes, cars didn’t stand a chance.

He’s never fallen from this bike, never been left stranded. There are supernatural reasons behind that, of course, but she’s been good to him nonetheless.

Now the heat from the roads is searing. It shimmers over the asphalt, turning towns into sere, weathered shadows of abandoned houses and naked trees. Steam curls lazily to the sky in places, and occasionally, the Triumph growls and leaps away from sinkholes and buckled asphalt without Sam laying a finger on the throttle.

Sweat sticks Sam’s shirt to his skin beneath his jacket, beads along his brow. He blinks stinging eyes and keeps focus, the steady vibration of the engine between his thighs a grounding force.

 _Carson City, girl,_ he thinks. It’s pretty routine, as Cas’s little errand missions go, but Sam has a bad feeling.

The bike rumbles under him, raring to go. She fades to a thin whine when he gives her what she wants and guns it. Her roar is a mutinous thing amidst the silence of the canyon, spooking the occasional bird out of its squat. The asphalt is hot and spider-webbed, seared dry by the scorching sun, but level enough to take at this speed, hundred and forty kph, the glide rich and buzzing and smooth as glass. Sam leans into the slipstream, the wind roaring at his ears, tearing at his leathers, and thinks of how there have been way worse days to be alive.

The duffel bag—his precious cargo—strapped onto his back and heavy against the assault of wind, serves as a reminder of that.

When the descent to Hoover Dam starts and Sam lets the Triumph hug the curves, cruising at a ninety, the dark is already settling in slick and silent. The Black Canyon echoes the sound of the bike, hollow and lonely. The 93 tapers up toward Boulder City and Sam sees the Colorado River out of the corner of his eye, stretching below them like a sleek black ribbon, its toxic mirror-sheen reflecting the half-moon in the sky.

For a moment he thinks something skitters on the surface, large and dark and zipping at a great speed over the water. But then he blinks and the Triumph surges ahead and there’s nothing.

A rustling by his collar. _Sam,_ says Lucifer, pleasant as if his next words will inquire after Sam’s health.

Sam ignores him. 

 _Steed’s got to drink_ , the Devil says, with a mock sigh.

A traveler alone in a world where the night is your enemy doesn’t have much of the odds stacked up in favor of his survival. The Darkness is a roiled thing, full of strange life whose beginning and ending couldn’t be found. Things whisper in the dark. Sometimes, they bite.

A vehicle isn’t a luxury on the roads now: she’s a necessity.

Sam pats the bike and she shrieks, throttles ahead and up the straightway like she’d never stop. But he hears the wheeze in her, a rattling sound that gets louder the greater he pushes her.

_Oh, Sammy. Ignore me all you want. Water your horse._

He slows and stops for a second, at this highest point, turning to watch the road that he’s passed. It looks hazy, sick with pollution— the river and the dam an ersatz version of the night sky. All the stars in the sky are reflected in the water, pinpricks of white against the dark.

For a second he breathes into his visor and imagines swimming. The dark water rinsing through his hair, the soft shroud of night against his body. He’d never actually take a dip in that water: the toxic fallout since Heaven fell against the Darkness would ensure that he’d probably turn into Spiderman.

But it’s nice, for a moment, to fantasize.

 _Water your horse,_ thinks Sam. _Like I’m some kind of goddamn knight._ And his horse is fury, is wind, avengement come blazing and frothing rage at the mouth. And its rider with a sword of fire, a lance of ice, a savior risen from ashes.

Right.

“We’ll find a filling station,” Sam mutters, and the bike purrs, quietly.

The Sin Church sits a little off Boulder City, on a road that splits off the Great Basin Highway. The road is in disrepair, and dust rises off it in a stream that would burn his face off by tomorrow if he weren’t otherwise protected. Sam passes a shotgunned shop-façade painted over with hyperinflation figures and angelic wards in the same hand, the words _God wasn’t the First and He won’t be the Last_ standing out in particular.

Sam takes a hard turn and the Church comes to view. It’s an old Connect convenience store attached to a still functioning BP station, with the husk of the Christmas tree in front hung heavy with rosaries. There are no lights, although in the Triumph’s headlights he can make out angel wards, glowing blue over the flank of the building.

It only makes him wince a little.

“Hey,” he calls, once he’s parked out of sight of any wandering thief and the glass doors have reluctantly slid open for him, “Brought you books.”

This is ceremony. He takes this route most often than not, and Nadira’s Church is the best hope for gasoline. Back at the beginning, when they were trying to figure out possible navigation and other things along this route, he’d had Cas put protections on this place as much as he could. These places could matter; Sam had thought then, become blood supply for the arteries of those who’d take on the Darkness.

He wasn’t wrong.

He deposits the CDs on the counter and waits until the CDs disappear, possibly gets counted, and Nadira’s dark head appears.

“Anything I asked for in there?” she asks.

“I got a Nicholas Sparks,” says Sam, “and a couple of mysteries. Hercule Poirot—I find him more entertaining than Sherlock, somehow.”

“Softer manners,” says Nadira, nodding. “Where are you going this time?”

“Carson City.”

“There’s nothing there. Close enough to Hell you can see the fire, that’s what other riders say.”

“Gotta do what I gotta do.”

“Is it a delivery for your…angel?” She stutters at _angel_ , rubs the empty edges of her eye-sockets.

“Yeah,” says Sam, sudden chill sparking up his spine. “Emergency.”

“Any sight of your brother, yet?”

Sam’s never going to get used to answering this question. “No. But I’m gonna—”

“Keep looking,” Nadira says. “I know, Sam.”

She tries not to be soft about it, not to sigh.

Sam’s not sure if that doesn’t make it worse.

Here’s what no one sees: on his trips, Sam always checks the first motel in the phonebook in every town except the ones too poisonous to merit staying.

And here’s what it means: he misses Dean. His spending there is on currency that never dries up. Sam wonders if he will go bankrupt one day, what that will mean considering his transgressions the past several times Dean has gone missing. Or maybe bankruptcy is the key: Dean always shows up just when Sam’s gone and depleted his cache and tries to start over.

He’s not starting over any time soon.

It’s the dreams that fuck him up: in his dreams, it hasn’t been ten years since Dean’s been missing. In his dreams, it’s just now, _now_ , and if he just does one thing differently, he can have his brother back. He wakes up from those dreams with a pit in his stomach and an ice-cube of fear melting in his heart.

Nadira clears her throat. “Are you alright, Sam?”

“Bike’s out front, N,” Sam says, on a rush of breath. “I’ll need a full tank. I’m gonna use the restroom out back.”

The Sin Church takes its name from all those priests who decried the faithful leaving actual churches to worship in places like this, where there is food and gas and protection and The Darkness can’t get at them. Sam and Castiel had planted these places, a pearl string of oases stretching from Kansas all the way to California. Meticulously laid out, like railroads would have been in the past—just take out the molten metal and fresh creosote, and pour in the magic instead.

 The walls in this building pop with graphic art, most of it rogue angels and fallen cities. Buildings trashed and burning, their great glass teeth broken and electrical intestines pulled out; airplanes beached like fat whales in shut-down airports too radioactive to touch; trains quiet as dead worms laid out across molten tracks.

Sam presses his fingers against the painted sky, devoid of all stars. There’s only frigid night.

There are monsters, dark and shadowy, people with the black stain of the Darkness leaking through their mouth and nostrils. But mostly it’s angels and the bombs that couldn’t destroy them.

Sam understands. The Darkness is a supernatural adversary that no one could blame for being evil.

The State and the angels: those things you could feel betrayed by.

In some places the art is blue—any shade of blue: turquoise, ultramarine, navy, cobalt—doesn’t matter. In some places the art is _sweeping_ waves of blue, blue for the enrobed Acolytes, some of them eyeless and most of them grim, and around their heads a gleaming light.

Saints. The Acolytes that squabble and crib and paw their way through books day in and day out at the bunker and other places: _saints_. 

Lucifer chortles. _The world had to be a toxic madhouse before Castiel got to be God, but he’s done rather well for himself, hasn’t he?_

Sam grits his teeth. “Didn’t see the promise very early, did you? When you were recruiting and all?”

_YOU hadn’t happened to him, then. First hint of promise he ever showed was at Stull Cemetery. You remember?_

Sam remembers. The angelic Molotov. The honeyed joy he’d felt at snapping his fingers and watching Castiel disintegrate.

No, not _him_ ; that joy belonged to Lucifer. It is important to remember that.

The water looks coppery but clean enough in the restroom. A mouthful and he’s reminded of how good it is— _water_ — his parched throat screaming for more and more and more. The stall has a broken door, swinging ghostly on its hinges, but no one will ever come in here anyway. His fingers feel numb from clutching the handlebars when he pulls off his gloves and tries to drop his pants. He takes a piss and then shuffles around to the sink, removing his jacket, careful to not jar the cargo strapped to it too much.

The problem with going through Nevada is that most of the towns in there sprung up around crossroads. Crossroads pose Sam the same problem they’ve always posed: demons, fawning hellspawn intent on carrying messages to Lucifer, or other dispossessed supernatural entities that just crowd around magic . And there’ve been reports of rogue angels of the Host in Vegas, burning people’s eyes out, same as it has been in almost a decade since that last stand of Heaven.

Sam pulls off his shirt and reaches for the marker he keeps on hand, double-checking the wards and runes peppered over his skin.

The mirror shows someone ten years younger.

 

Close his eyes and he thinks he can maybe pretend that the last ten years are a long nightmare. This restroom is generic enough to warrant placement in any BP in any Nowhere Town, America. He and Dean could be on their way to any case.

Close his eyes and he can pretend he hears the impatient rumble of the Impala outside, feel the palpable restraint with which Dean’s holding on from honking at him. _Come on, Sammy, zip it up already._

Something—like a shadow or an eidolon—breaks up his fantasy.

He blinks, and Mirror Sam blurs a little. When he looks again it is still him in there, grimace and all, except for the snake wrapped around his shoulders.

“Really,” he says, pulling a face. “You could pass for a feather boa.”

 _Leave the quips to Dean,_ suggests Lucifer. _You try too hard. It betrays your terror._

The snake slithers up around his neck. Its head snaps back, mouth opens. Teeth like needles, venom black as midnight. Sam holds his breath. He can’t feel it, except in the most ghostly sense, but the spike of fear that rises hot and bitter at the back of his throat is real.

Lucifer’s laugh is ghostly in his head, but Sam imagines for a moment that his own eyes flash mirth.

 _That’s not me,_ Sam thinks, _it will never be_. _I said no._

He wants to throw something at the mirror, break it. Instead, he looks himself in the eye.

“I’m not afraid of you. You can’t hurt me here.”

_And I won’t. We had a deal. Would I lie to you, Sammy?_

A deal. Sure, you could call it that—if being awarded Lucifer-radio without really asking for it could be a _deal_. Cas couldn’t figure it out, and they’d never seen Crowley after the fiasco with the Cage, but the visions had never gone away, the Devil still always rummaging around in his head despite Sam now knowing it had been him all along. He’d tried to push him out, of course, but when things went to hell, it had looked like perhaps Lucifer would be useful from a distance, after all.

Cas had brokered the deal: ten years, information exchange, in return for scenery other than the Cage. He’d literally drawn up the paperwork for this thing, all clauses carefully checked and cross-checked, loopholes closed, stranger sections translated to several languages so as to gauge possible hidden meanings.

The Devil was in the details, after all.

 A deal. Sam thinks back to a golden time when his own voice was all that was in his head, when he had known, bone deep, soul deep, his name and his face and who he was. Long ago—longer than ten years ago. It’s all shadow now. He’s more than just one person in this haunted body.

_The time period on our deal is running out, Sam._

“I know. One more day and you’re out of my head.”

“Is it so bad having me around?”

The voice comes from behind him. Sam whips around so hard he thinks he’s cricked his neck, and Lucifer— _Nick_ Lucifer—looks at him pityingly.

“I don’t want you poking around in my head,” Sam says, swallowing. He backs up against the sink, feels the cold ceramic like a shock against his bare skin. All these years and his body still twists violently away from Lucifer, spectral muscle memory stronger than anything his will can conjure. “I’ve had enough of that. And you’re not fucking real.”

“But I can’t do anything to you,” says Lucifer, reasonably.  “Well, except maybe torment you by talking to you. And what’ve I even said that’s so offensive?”

“Plenty,” hisses Sam.

“Oh, is this about the time I ranked your sexual experiences? You know, I know: I come up top. Not even your twisted up incestuous shit with Dean can come _anywhere_ close. Though I’m curious, if I’m still in your head, and you two fuck around—”

“Please.” Sam screws his eyes shut. “Stop.”

“Okay, okay. Just saying. Anyway, I’ve been of invaluable help. You can’t deny that, Sam.”

“You told us a story about the Darkness,” scoffs Sam. “You did—”

“Everything to protect you,” Lucifer says. “In all these ten years, you’ve never once fallen, and the Triumph has never failed you. _I_ told you how to make that bike your own in ways beyond humans. You’ve found gasoline where you stopped, you’ve never been hunted by the creatures of the Void that the Darkness controls, and you’ve never once lost your way.”

“Luck,” says Sam. He can’t stomach the idea of supernatural protection courtesy of the Devil. Is this a bluff? It has to be. “I’ve been careful. And Castiel helped.”

Lucifer rolls his eyes. “Oh, come _on,_ Sam. You’re the smart one. _Probability_ rings a bell? This world is a fucking wasteland. And it’s never—not even _once_ —got its claws in you. Does that compute right?”

“You couldn’t … _protect_ me. Not from the Cage.”

Lucifer shrugs. “The Cage has a crack in it. As you very well know,” he shakes his head at Sam, as if Sam were a small, mischievous child, “I told you how to fight against the Darkness, Sam. And look at yourself—have you changed the slightest in the last decade?”

“I put that down to all the radioactive mutation.”

Lucifer’s lip curls. “No greys, no illnesses, none of the trappings of your race’s greatest attribute: _finiteness._ I’ve been _helping_. Whether you like it or not. And your angel knows it, and that’s why he never wants to meet you face to face.”

“That’s not true.”

“Oh? Strange, then. That you two keep missing each other, only talking through the phone or the Acolytes. He looks at you and sees _me_ , and he can’t do a thing about it because I’m _helping_.”

Sam grits his teeth, feels the blood roar in his head. “What do you want?”

“Ah!” Lucifer claps his hands. “Let’s get straight to it. A re-negotiation.”

“What?”

“Ten more years.”

Sam laughs, mirthlessly. “Forget it. The deal’s been made.”

“It can be re-made.”

“ _No._ I’m not scared of you.”

Lucifer hmms, thoughtfully. “No, you really aren’t much. That’s part of your charm.”

“I don’t need you.”

“Sam, _Sam._ Everyone _wants_ you to. Your angel, the Acolytes—their jobs are easier because of you. Because of me. Have I ever denied you knowledge when you asked?”

“I’ve never asked,” snaps Sam.

Lucifer spreads his hands. “Then I’ve volunteered, anyway. Sam, is it so hard to believe that I don’t want your body anymore? I _don’t._ You’ve served your use, you’ve been used, there’s nothing I haven’t done to you that you could be of any entertainment anymore,” Lucifer shrugs. “And this ongoing fight against the First Mother is a treat to watch. Perhaps not …participate.”

Sam takes a deep breath. “And if I say no to re-negotiation?”

Lucifer shrugs. “Then you do this ride without me. Think of it as a test drive.”

“Great.”

Lucifer smiles. It’s cold and flat, and Sam feels a thrum of panic at it still. “You’ll be lucky to finish it alive.”

“Bring it on,” Sam whispers, and watches the Devil fade.

When he gets back outside, Nadira’s just finishing up with his bike. She smacks its side and the Triumph shivers, ready to run.

“I don’t have enough for a full tank,” Nadira says, apologetically. “I’ll call and let Beatty know you’re coming. The Church there’s got to have some gas. Here, I’ve got you some stuff: water, some crackers if you need it, a new lighter. I know you don’t smoke, but it gets dark out there sometimes without a headlight, and it’s faster than matches. Wish I had a torch to lend, but I don’t.”

“That’s okay, Nadira, thanks,” says Sam, strapping his helmet on. He looks up and grimaces at the sky, grey with clouds now, impending rain. “Stay safe.”

“You too. Stay clear of the rain—you don’t want that water touching your skin.”

Sam slings his leg over the bike and chokes the start button. The Triumph roars confidently, as though this is any other ride. 

He sends up a prayer—to Cas, although Cas hasn’t really answered or showed up in quite a while now.

Still.

“Just you and me then, girl,” he tells the Triumph. He twists the throttle and the bike leaps forward.

And so begins the game.


	2. The Darkness

** **

 

**7 HOURS**

**LAS VEGAS – BEATTY; NEVADA**

Here’s what Lucifer told Sam about the Darkness:

  * That it— _She_ —had been the First. And when God became self-aware, He saw that He was one thing and She was something else. And when He said, _let there be light,_ She and her thousand hungry mouths fled to the edge of the Radiance, where She called him _brother_ and hoped not for conflict.
  * That when it looked like His will wouldn’t be absolute, His dominion not univocal, because He hadn’t created Her, he cut the archangels out of the light and bid them to destroy Her.
  * And so it was that Gabriel blew his war horn for the very first time, and the archangels flung burning chains of Grace into the Void and captured Her, banishing Her forever to a place deep beneath Earth, forever bound in chains of light and locked in with the Mark.



Which—great story, and there’s more to it, because what is Lucifer if not visual: Sam has seen visions of The Darkness roiling, at the far reaches of Heaven where things were silent and cold and the Darkness still exerted dominion, swelling into shores of divine light, a sound rising from it like a hymn or a dirge or a song of annihilation while the archangels charged at Her. 

Cas just said Lucifer’s bias against God came through _pretty_ strong in the tale.

Sam isn’t so sure.

He hasn’t thought of God as an entity in a long while, but now, as he enters the ruins of Las Vegas, past dun desert landscapes and through rapidly cooling night, he wonders if God is, actually and finally, _dead._ Pretty strange to ride through desolate suburbia and the ghosts of old hotels and casinos without wondering how this could have come to pass.

Faith is a rope you climb, Sam thinks, at the edge of which is another rope. Somewhere in your life is a point where you either let go, or keep climbing with the fear of one day letting go. Waiting at the bottom is probably not demons with pitchforks, but maybe they don’t need to be.

Disappointment works fine.

The air is dry as a bone out here, scorched to stillness by the sun every day. The nights taste like haze and simmered concrete. Sam pauses at old downtown, balancing the Triumph between his thighs and bracing his feet against the melted tarmac, reaching into his pack to find his water.

His fingers come away wet and the water skin three-quarters empty.

So that’s how this is going to be.

He swallows dry, brushing wetness against his lips, and then goes ahead and drinks whatever is left of the water in huge gulps. Better now than later, when it could completely leak and leave him empty-handed.

The Triumph snarls, gathering speed past the city, to where the highway stretches out black and hazy and ghost-film empty in the headlights of the bike.

There’s no moon, no stars now. Only the firmament of the sky. Sam reaches around to press buttons on the phone in his pocket, and his headphones start to blare all the old road songs—AC/DC and The Rolling Stones, good old Led Zeppelin and other Dean favorites.  He’s tried, in the past, to get a newer playlist going: indie and alternative and decades beyond the 80s, but it feels oddly like betraying his brother. Moreover, something about them and these roads together is comforting. It’s like Soundscapes of the Winchester Saga, and Sam can’t escape it.

He passes empty townships and abandoned trailers, a single house with lights in the windows and faces pressed against them to watch him and his loud bike pass by. Rock begins to flank him; old mining regions, mountains with gaping chunks taken out of them and toxic rivers curling lazily through still-green ravines. Sometimes he sees more signs of life: a store selling cigarettes and oranges with an electric lamp on the counter, a man and three dogs jogging outside Mercury. In the headlights, the wash of the man’s hands is a bright red.

“Blessings,” the man calls after him, and somehow that sends spidery chills running down Sam’s spine.

The Triumph screeches at high speeds, and _Styx_ rocks on in Sam’s ears.  His head swims from thirst and he begins to dream of Beatty—water and gasoline there in plenty, Acolytes at a base.

Only, there’s a simmer of haze rising off the ground now, making it hard to see. It happens sometimes, fog and pollution and the heat from the day waylaying passengers with amorphous ghosts, but never like this. This is a thick, white veil: bolts and bolts of bridal lace, tumbling haphazardly across the hardpan landscape. Wind picks up, all bells and chimes, dust dervishes rising.

“Easy,” Sam mutters, choking back on the throttle. Sweat drips from his brow. He slows and shuts the music, guides the Triumph nice and easy through the haze of smoke. It’s acrid, its sudden heat scorching: Sam does a galvanic backward jerk and the bike wobbles, and he’s sweating and coughing into his helmet even as he evens her out.

The taste of it burns the back of his throat.

“Shit,” he rasps, and leans forward, throttle twisted all the way through. The Triumph jerks and shoots forward, out of the smog and onto a stretch of road that looks nothing like the highway that leads to Beatty. “Where the hell are we?”

The hills that wing the road are strange: they rise, and then even out with flat-tops from where smoke rises like they’re all slow pressure cookers waiting to blow. Perhaps subterranean fire: Sam’s heard of that kind of thing, streams of molten metal and ever-burning fire running beneath towns. Sinkholes, shaky earth, a whole church toppling into an underground inferno. Metaphors run aplenty in such spaces. That Town from Hell. Dante’s Rest Stop. The Devil’s Dance Floor. And soon enough, a town shimmers into view, the dark shapes of unlit houses like a sign of unwelcome.

The wheels sound strange on the tarmac, and Sam looks down to see snow. Nothing makes sense anymore.

The Triumph growls, warily.

Eventually, there’s a small bridge, and a woman in a black dress standing by it. Her arms are folded.

 _Fuck,_ thinks Sam. He doesn’t suppose he could just speed past her, but he tries egging the throttle forward, anyway.

Sam’s bike stops with a desultory _clink_.

 “Hullo,” says the woman.

“Amara.”

He can’t say she doesn’t cause the immediate visceral reaction of fear in him. She does. He thinks of how she can weave into the heads of angels and cause them to go nuts, how she can turn people into black-goo spitting, hate-filled killing machines with a shelf-life of about a few hours.

How, even now, light treats her differently.

Amara smiles, with her lips first, then her teeth, and then her mouth opens wide. There is a world in there, dark and swirling, an entire city of souls. Named and set roaming in the halls of the Darkness. Sam sees it, and the snake that lives within him hisses at it. Amara’s jaw corkscrews back into place, and she smiles with her lips again.

“Always wanted to meet you myself,” says Amara, “but somehow you always slipped my gaze until now. My Creations have never met you either, Sam. Why do you think that is?”

“I’ve been lucky?”

“Or protected,” Amara says, shrugging. “All those angels I turned nuclear, all those silly things your people did to try and destroy me—and that angel of yours just kept evading me, sending you off on his errands, the trump card I couldn’t touch. Did he grow tired of you?”

“I grew tired of something else.”

“Something worse than me.”

Sam laughs. “Maybe.”

“The Devil?”

“He says you knew him by a different name.”

“True.” Amara raises a brow. “Once long ago, I reached out and touched the Morningstar. He was brighter than anything I’d seen. I burned. But I’m patient, and I pay back my debts. The Devil, you call him. He’s reviled more than I ever was. And you were _his_ ,” Amara smiles, gently. “I noticed that, you know? When I was first released. I noticed your brother more, but I didn’t ignore the part you played. I just couldn’t get past the shock, the _familiarity_ of something that wasn’t _him_ but…almost the same thing.”

Sam fixes his gaze on the road. Something turns over in his stomach. If he could just get to Beatty, he thinks, he’ll have a moment to rest. To cut away all the conversations he’s had this night and banish them to the back of his mind. Everything falls over each other: Cas, Lucifer, Amara... and Dean, always Dean, as a thrum of nameless, untouchable worry. Everything falls over like skittles, and he needs a moment to put it all into labeled boxes.

“You’re probably wondering where your brother is.”

Sam looks up, sharply.

“I might have told you, long back, if you hadn’t been hidden from me. If you hadn’t been protected. Now it won’t matter, as much.”

Amara is close enough to touch. She rests her palm on the Triumph and it growls, threateningly. She laughs, and raises her hand again, as if to touch him.

Sam thinks suddenly of blood in the snow. Tracks. A hunt: it’s something simple, like a rugaru or a werewolf or a particularly vehement tree spirit. He only has to get it in his crosshairs, and shoot. _Now, Sammy, gank that bastard._ Blood on the snow.

No Devil. No Darkness.

Easy little thing, a thrill; heading back, they’d bump shoulders and celebrate with something like a chicken dinner. Laugh over a game.

No Devil. No—

“But I’ve upset you, now,” clucks Amara, pulling her hand away.  “Tell me something, Sam. What are you transporting?”

_A fire brighter than a star. A link in a great celestial chain. We’ve been building it for years now, just for you._

“I think you know.”

Amara holds out her hand, wordless. Sam stares at her.

 “You really are used to people just doing your bidding, aren’t you?”

_“Give it to me and you can leave.”_

_“And if I don’t?”_

_“Your soul’s mangled,” Amara says, lightly. “I couldn’t consume you. Anyway, it’s not mine to consume.”_

_“There are others that are soul-eaters like you?”_

_“You’ll be surprised.”_

_Sam closes his eyes for a second. If he could just get to Beatty…_

_“If you don’t give me the package, I’ll let you leave,” shrugs Amara. “But you won’t like the scenery.”_

_“That’s what you say,” Sam says, hunkering down, hand on the throttle. The road shatters behind him, spits tar and asphalt, the Triumph bolting forward like an eager horse, “all you motherfucking losers with your magic bag of tricks. That’s what you all say.”_

Onward, then.

Into the dark, night shattering like glass in the thin beam of the bike’s Cyclopean eye.

He doesn’t check the mirror until he passes the next mile-marker. Could be, the Darkness’s creatures are right on his tail. Could be, she herself is, haunting him like a highway ghost.

But when he looks in, finally, all he sees are the lights of Beatty, behind him now, shining like a receding mirage, terribly unreachable.

**6 HOURS**

**BEATTY - GOLDFIELD**

The darkness does you in.

Somewhere on the 95, the Triumph coughs and splutters, and the lights go out. It whimpers apologetically as it dies. Sam swears, voice too loud in the darkness, kicks the stand out and slides off the bike. It leans against him—a drunken, sleeping monster. His legs tremble for a moment on the ground from inertia; his wrists chafe from holding the handlebars.

He steadies the bike and then straightens, looking around, trying to adjust to the steady pool of oily blackness on all sides. His flashlight doesn’t switch on. Nadira’s lighter does, though, thin flame flickering for a second before wisping out. At least that’s better than nothing.

His music still works. _Yeah, you shook me all night long_. Comfortably familiar, but he turns it off. No need to be a careless schmuck if something had the likelihood of sneaking up on him.

“Come on, girl,” he mumbles, pressing the start switch. Sam thinks, with a sickening lurch of nostalgia, of being bruised and battered and on the run and Dean hitting the ignition of the Impala with the same hopeful prayer. _Come on, girl. Don’t leave me stranded here._

 _I would have told you,_ Sam replays, Amara’s voice cutting him like glass. What would she have said about Dean? His stomach churns at the thought of a lead lost while he played errand-boy. Nausea rises acid-hot in his throat. What if she could actually have led him to Dean?

No. Whatever she said would have been a lie. Monsters lie. And she’s the biggest monster of them all—as big as God.

Sam grits his teeth and tries again. The Triumph growls, faint and hopeful, before thinning down to a low whine.

He opens the tank and moves the bike this way and that and hears no sloshes. She’s dry as a desert. There’s probably a gas-station somewhere within a mile’s distance. He might have to improvise a siphon to get gas into the bike, but actually getting to the station will be the hardest part. Slumbering, the Triumph weighs a hell of a lot. Sam’s breathing in salt and smoke, sweaty and thirsty, and he doesn’t think he’ll last long enough to haul her all the way to a town anyway.

Fuck this. He’ll walk if he has to; steal someone else’s radioactive trash-heap of a car if it can be hotwired. Lucifer can’t have been the only thing keeping him alive all these years. He’s seen places, mapped out safe and not-safe in his brain— that ought to count for something.

God’s useless, Lucifer’s a douche, and Cas is that number that’s permanently unreachable. Dean’s been MIA long enough for the detail to not matter to Sam’s survival in this world. It’s just him and the killing earth.

But the darkness does him in.

It swallows up the details, swallows up the sky, pools like oil through his helmet and in his eyes and ears— and even with the ground steady under his feet and the map of the highway etched in his mind he knows he could get lost, he could be walking in circles, walking straight into a trap. The dark is no one’s friend, least of all Sam’s. It was bright in the Cage but sometimes Lucifer used to make it dark, just like this, thick darkness that you’d have to work to scrape out of your mouth. And in that dark he used to stand hidden, marking Sam’s body with his fingers where he’ll know to carve away the best meat, and when Sam screamed the dark would get in his lungs and squeeze tight.

Lucifer can’t hurt him like that here, of course, but this is what darkness does.

Take your fears and amplify them back to you.

He can’t walk towards anything in this. It’s too unpredictable.

He feels like he’s being watched. Like there are monsters just a few steps ahead of him, standing in faithful silence to their mistress and waiting for him to walk up to them. He flicks the lighter again, wishes he had a newspaper or something to light.

“Damn,” he murmurs, leaning over the bike. It sleeps on.

There’s another trick, beyond gasoline; another lifeline that might work.

He finds his knife and makes a cut in his arm. He can’t even see the blood, but drops of it hit the tank and the Triumph growls a little. That piece of blood-magic is still working then.

A moment, and then the headlamp come on. Relief rushes into him, over-sweet and fragmentary. Sam takes a sharp breath, blinks against the sudden brightness.

A girl stands in the middle of the road.

Her mouth is open, wide, and the moment he realizes she’s screaming, he can hear it.

The earth snaps once from side to side.

He’s aware—in a single moment—that this girl is something that the Acolytes whisper about. _If you see something in the midst of the road, don’t stop to ask its name._ Her—its—mouth is open impossibly wide now, something black crawling out of it, a head and a torso and many legs.

The asphalt buckles beneath him. In the last second, he grabs Castiel’s package from where it swings on the handlebar of the Triumph, and then the ground bucks, and he’s thrown off it and against the flat waste on the side of the road.

The pain is blinding and instantaneous and lasts only for a few seconds.

***

He’s dazed and the sun’s shining and there’s a white table laid with an elegant dinner service.

 _Alice in Wonderland_ , Sam thinks, but that isn’t it, that’s not the inspiration. A video-game horror quality permeates this weirdness, as if everything that can smile might do it with much too many teeth.

This is a dream. A vision. Something that isn’t real.

Amara sits across him, smiling blandly, tossing something from hand to hand. A spark, blue fire: a soul?

“You and your brother are so very different,” she says. “There are things that leave indelible marks on a soul. Fratricide, matricide, excessive carnality. That’s a non-exhaustive list, though. Nearly _everything_ seems to be a sin. The sin-counters of God’s Heaven seemed to have liked lots of clauses. What do you think has left a mark on your soul?”

 _Maybe everything, one way or the other_. “What do you want?”

“I’m curious, Sam Winchester. This journey of ten years, this project to destroy me, that angel of yours. Shall we take a walk?”

Amara glances across at him and flicks her wrist. Everything dissolves into darkness and muted thunder. Sam takes a sharp breath: he knows this place. When it grows brighter and brighter, he knows what it means.

Lucifer’s true form is not a lion, not anything Dante could have described with his mere mortal eyes. Perhaps Virgil couldn’t have either. Angelic true-forms don’t work like that, couldn’t be described by people. Brightness and lashing steel, Sam might have said if he limits his imagination to three planes of reality. Fire and sharp edges and the intent to torment—it pulsed through the Devil like blood, like life itself. When he thinks of Hell he doesn’t remember this; perhaps Cas had taken this away.

This was brightness that got more and more unbearable, until he could feel his eyes dribble out of his sockets. The sound of what could be millions of gears gnashing against each other, an uber-sonic wave that crushed the brain under its onslaught.  Steel against and _inside_ his skin.

“They’re well-made war weaponry, aren’t they?” asks Amara, in his ear. “The angels. They’re not very different from your robots, actually. I read books about them, by a man named Asimov. He proposed three fundamental laws for these beings: never harm its Creator, never harm itself unless to prevent harm to its Creator, and always obey the Creator unless the order itself harms the Creator.  Ingenious, really, how the creations He made themselves create, and fear free-will from them exactly how He did.”

Sam drops to his knees as the brightness goes beyond tolerable limits. It’s like knives have sunk into the flesh of his eyeballs, heat melting them—pain beyond screaming. Amara stands beside him, a quiet presence, and when the lashing steel of the Devil’s true-form reaches for him, a whooshing promise of violation just like in his once-lost memory, she flicks her wrist again.

Sam’s eyesight comes back. He opens his eyes to find that he’s curled in on himself on the ground, as if in anticipation of whatever horror the Cage had to offer, and that this is now not the Cage but 2016. The real Year of the Darkness. It’s 2016 and him and Cas have just killed an angel. An angel that Amara managed to corrupt, turned into a weapon against humanity, set loose. All she had to do to take down an entire town was have a single angel go rampant on it in true-form. All people had to do was to look at it, in all its incomprehensible glory, and any resistance against the Darkness would end right there.

 _He can’t really have you,_ the Cas-of-then says to Sam, brokering the deal with the Devil, _and we need information_.

 _Whoa,_ says the Sam-of-then, warily, _where did this come from_?

_How many angels do we kill before we can even get near the Darkness? What about Dean? We need to find out how to stop her now; Lucifer is the only way. I would do it myself but he—_

_Has a soft corner for me?_

“The Devil,” Amara says, amused. “The Devil who tortured you. The Devil who took everything from you. It was the Devil that told you how to stop me? You let him out to learn my weakness?”

“We didn’t let him out. We almost made that mistake; I wouldn’t let it happen again. It was like…a radio. In my head.”

“You didn’t let him out?” Amara asks, mildly.

“No.”

“Hmm,” she shrugs, “I could have sworn.”

Amara flicks her wrist again. Sam squints to see through the haze and the heat but he knows where they are: Cas has taken him here once, this place under a molten sky, burning forever. A crucible of perpetual fire. The ground is scooped deep, circular like a bowl, and fire blazes within.  The closer you went the more awe inducing it got. At the very edge, the fire was bright and pure as gemstones, the smoke like ghosts in torment.

The Darwaja in Turkmenistan. What locals called a Gate of Hell—only it wasn’t, really, despite appearances to the contrary. Just an eternally burning furnace. More than the flame, it was the _perpetuity_ that lent magic to this place.

 _This is where we build the weapon,_ Cas had told him then.

“A weapon of Grace,” muses Amara, “That’s what they got me with the first time.”

“It takes time,” says Sam, quietly. “To build.”

“Understandable. Something as big as me—it must be just like trying to destroy God. Have you ever asked yourself where God is in all this, Sam?”

_Left the building. Doesn’t want a box seat to the game, let alone a spot on the team._

_Dead, possibly._

“All I want to do is _find_ Him, Sam. That’s it. That’s my entire agenda—that’s the sole reason of my being on this planet. If He would just show His face. But He doesn’t. And so I have to scream and shout, and shout some more, until it gets so that I just can’t be ignored. When do you think that day will come?”

 _Never,_ thinks Sam, still staring into the fire. _Perpetual,_ a Cas-voice is shouting at the back of his head, _as in ALWAYS._ Forever. _Like you, and your deals, and your years that aren’t years, a never-ending cycle_. That last part’s not a Cas voice though, that’s just Sam. Everything feels like a continuation of something else: screw this up, and this happens, and screw that up, then this happens. Their wins spawn new horrors. Which is either win-win or lose-lose depending on how you looked at it, from what time and with respect to which events as a frame of reference. Only thing that’s ever remained constant is the glaring absence of the Lord Almighty.

“I don’t think He cares what you do, anymore,” he tells Amara, “I don’t think He cares about any of this. I don’t think He gives a fuck about anything, actually.”

Amara laughs. “Like a child who has thrown his playthings about and now sulks, unwilling to pick them up. Riddle me this, Sam Winchester. What exactly has God ever given you?” She stands above him, her face curious, eyes glinting like embers. “He’s done nothing but left you to clean up one mess after another, and still _I’m_ the bad one?”

“Maybe I’ve never been worthy.”

Amara’s brow goes up. Her fingers press against his forehead. He expects fire, ice; braces with scales of one-to-ten steady at hand to label, measure, file away what can’t be described so it can be better dealt with.

There’s nothing though.

 Just—that one night when he was twelve and they were smack in the middle of some snowy mountain path and Dad was probably bleeding to death and Dean was trying not to throw them off a cliff. Sam had never wished more for God until that day, in the back seat, _God please I’ll never even miss training or slam a door or yell at him, please, just let my Dad stay_. That night he tastes now, iron and salt and snow, numbing his tongue.

And then, years later, ten seconds that seemed like an eternity, when he opened his eyes and saw Jess on the ceiling and thought _no, please, not her, not like this._ The smell of smoke, of flesh burning, Dean’s arms around him and his mind going _please God, please no._

The rest is a jumble, Doppler-blur necklace of moments: a chapel in a hospital after that car crash—a church and bright light and hope for a fragmentary few hours—belief and hope for ten seconds before a dagger stabs white-hot ripping into his spine--a year full of whispered prayers for Dean, please, for _Dean_ , if he could just find a solid lead _somewhere, God_ —

After he’d let out Lucifer came an airplane, a literal _dues ex machina:_ but Sam hadn’t thought of God with the beatific pleasure of the faithful then. He’d been impure, unclean, he’d let out Lucifer—and God had still saved him, and the weight of that guilt was heavy, crushing.

In Stull Cemetery, though, imprisoned in his own body, he’d screamed for whatever deity might have been listening.

Nobody was.

Nobody was listening in the Cage, either, except Lucifer.

Sam didn’t drift away—though he thought he did—he never had, he knew that with the Trials. Hadn’t he known the Trials would end in his death?  Faith works that way. There are always sacrifices.

With the fire in his blood and his lungs in shreds that confessional should have felt like torture, but it didn’t, it felt like _benediction_. His heart could explode any second, and his bones all felt like they were melting beneath his skin, but it had all felt like blessing, like being chosen, like being—there was the operative word— _clean_. God, all he’d ever wanted was to be normal. Human.

But he had failed that test. He had looked away from God. Or perhaps there wasn’t God then, either, just a set of old inscribed rules and a few levers to pull.

Two years later, on his knees with Dean standing over him though, wielding the scythe of Death, Sam had a flickering prayer for it to be over. Involuntary, almost. _Just please let it be over._ And then the Darkness. The visions, the Cage—how foolish, _foolish_ had he been.

Dangling whatever was left of his faith behind him, peeking at it only when he thought fit—what a blind fool he’d been.

“Oh, Sam.”

Amara takes his face between her hands. Her touch is hot now, a shock to the system, unbearably Divine. Tears run down his face, unchecked. He leans into her touch, the ozone-crackle scent of her, the heat from her like a brand.

This could be bliss, thinks Sam, could be rapture.

_Could be a trick._

“ _Never been worthy_ ,” she sighs. “Really, Sam. Do you still think there hasn’t been, in all those years, one single moment when you’ve not been worthy enough of—well, if not a discount miracle—at least a signal?”

“I don’t know,” gasps Sam. It’s hard to breathe through the tumult of emotions rushing through him, the _holiness_ of her. Pressure builds behind his eyelids. He shudders, and Amara kneels down beside him, her hands running over his shoulders, down his back, pulling him closer.

“There _has_ ,” she declares, her lips brushing his forehead first, and then his lips, “There has, Sam— _many_ moments. He just didn’t care enough. I could. I could care enough, make sure that you get what you deserve for everything you’ve done, everyone you’ve saved. All the pain you’ve taken on upon yourself to save _His_ world that He has no time for.”

“I don’t–”

“Where do miracles come from?” asks Amara, the vibrations of her voice teasing at the shell of his ear, “Maybe He isn’t the only one who engineers them. Maybe your miracles will come from a different place. And when you realize that, I will have you, Sam Winchester.”

 Amara flicks her wrist.

***

The road.

The monster.

The girl—his bike—the package—

There are rocks pressing against his back, sand in his lungs, blood seeping into his hair. He breathes—shallow and quick—time hasn’t passed, here, the creature he saw before he got thrown off the road still advances. It has glass teeth and a triangular face, cables sparking where its heart should be, copper wires lashing the air at the edges of its fleshy hands.

 _Fuck,_ thinks Sam. In ten years, he hasn’t seen something like this, these things that frequently tear Castiel’s missionary Acolytes to shreds.

Amara’s creativity isn’t limited to just flesh and blood.

The wires spark with electricity as they lash out at him. Sam rolls, shouting out at the pain, feels the heat and hears the _zing_ of the wires dashing against the ground instead. He manages to grab his gun and fire a couple of rounds, take cover beneath a rock and shatter some of the glass teeth with his bullets. The thing lashes out again and catches him on the chest, just a brush as Sam jumps backward, but that’s enough—the pain rattles him intensely, blinds him, spreads white noise in his ears. He goes down, rocks scraping his palms bloody, rolls once and feels rough gorse, sand, and then road.

He crawls up against the bike, barely able to see, blinking away the fuzz in his vision.

The creature waits, the copper sparking against the ground, seeking him out.

 _Think._ Sam fires again, from the cover of the bike, at the head this time. The thing rears back, but the wires snap taut, slashes the air. Sam slides away at the last second.

Something slithers slick against the rim of the wheel.

 _Second time asking, Sam,_ Lucifer says. _Say the word and help is yours._

“Second time saying _no_ ,” rasps Sam. The lighter that Nadira gave him is in his hand; he slams it down against the asphalt just as the sparking copper fingers of the creature whip down on him a final time, feels wetness spread beneath his fingers as the cheap plastic casing breaks.

A spark.

An electric arc.

Fire races up the shorted copper wires and jolts the creature. The shock from it zigzaws up Sam’s arm like a chainsaw katana—it’s electric, nameless, violet pain—throws him clear off the ground and backward. His back arches, head slams against the ground, but _thankfully,_ thankfully, he doesn’t get knocked out.

Amara’s creature burns silently. In a few seconds, it collapses heavily to the ground. Now that he thinks about it, it had never made a sound, except for the electricity sparking off it.

Sam twists to his side and screams, silently, the pain along his right arm and shoulder too big to even think about. His stomach lurches and he heaves, but there’s nothing to even vomit. The smell of fire and dusty road and burnt flesh assaults his nostrils. In time, he swallows a couple of times and staggers somehow to his feet, stumbling, Castiel’s stupid package still safely dangling off his good arm.

He walks. It’s ridiculous—he’s being ridiculous—but it’s so simple: one foot in front of the other, keep going, so easy to focus on that one thing once he puts his mind to it.

He has to think about the bike in a few minutes, how he’s going to get the package to Carson City, but for now it fucking _hurts_ , and he walks.

Past the monster, still burning.

Past the Triumph.

Lights pop bright in his vision. His breathing is terrible, labored. The skin on the palm of his good hand feels blistered from the poisoned soil. 

He hears Amara in his head, hallucination or dream or whatever, saying _there have: there have been times when you have been worthy, when God should have waved_. Make this one—Sam thinks venomously, at whatever God is listening. _Let me finish this one ride, and then I’ll re-negotiate with the Devil._ This one ride, the one he’s been told he’d be lucky to finish alive: let him have this one win in all of these ten years.

It’s really not fucking too much to ask, he thinks. Barest dignity: a single _win._

His head spins. He stumbles—and this time he falls, loose gravel skidding beneath his toes. He falls, and someone grabs him (his good hand, his shoulder, a hand around his back.)

“Cas?” Sam grunts. _About time,_ he thinks, foggily. Darkness is creeping through his vision: he blinks against it.

“No, Sammy,” he hears, faintly, the voice sounding far away now, far away and almost back in time, “I gotcha.”


	3. The Green Interlude

**THE GREEN INTERLUDE**

In the early days of Amara’s attack on humanity, Sam stayed huddled in the bunker. He and Cas watched TV—bombs, missiles, _anything_ to stop Amara—until there wasn’t any TV to watch. Then radio. Cas flickered in and out, secretive missions, terse negative head-shakes every time Sam asked for leads on Dean. Sam searched, of course, with spells and summonings and even an ill-advised trip to an astral plane. Nothing helped.

In his dreams, sometimes there were reunions. And as years passed, and they became more fantasy, Sam found himself waking from them with less tears in his eyes and more wistfulness: he stopped knowing, he thinks, what it might feel like to _be_ reunited with his brother.

Thinking of reunions made his bones ache with the sweetness of the thought. But at the same time, it terrified him.

Where would they start? Where _could_ they? How did this not get easier each time?

The town rises up out of nowhere, a sudden oasis of lights in the midst of the dark. Sam’s flickering consciousness snapshots random things: a Texaco, a fire-station, a Scolaris, hills in the distance. Everything clean; air crisp and desert-cold, whipping through his hair, stinging against his wounds. He tries to take stock of them but all he knows is that something is really wrong with his arm. He’s still got that package, bloody and held against his chest in the crook of his elbow.

And Dean’s driving.

“No way,” Sam breathes, quiet slur to the words.

“Ssshh, just calm down.”

_Calm down?_

Radio’s playing something—Sam struggles to remember, then pegs it down as Jimi Hendrix.

“I’ve to get to Carson City,” he mutters, numbly. His fingers find the door-latch, claws gently at the mechanism.

“Sam,” says Dean, tautly, “If you try and open that door, I swear I’m gonna clock you one and knock you out.”

“Oh, God, please,” Sam mumbles, a rush of words into the fingers of his good arm. He doesn’t know what the prayer is for. _Please knock me out. Please let me go._

Please let this be real.

 _You can’t be serious,_ the Devil laughs in his head.

Sam swallows, hard. Tastes blood and bile.

“Dean?”

“Shut up, Sam. Please.”

Sam’s horrified, he thinks. He’s _horrified._ He’s in pain, he’s probably hallucinating, and he doesn’t know where the bike is. Without the bike, the night is an impassable enemy. The mute horror of all this dissolving like an oasis creeps up on him. He feels sick, giddy.

“Where are we going?”

It turns out: the _Best Western_ motel. It even has a pool and everything. Rain—more a steady mist than anything—collects on the windshield and the wipers smear at them ineffectively. There’s lightning, crackling far out and sourceless in the sky.

Sam hears more than sees Dean get out of the car. The snap of the door is familiar and make his bones ache. He counts footsteps (do hallucinations have footsteps?) through the slush and the crack of thunder, and scrambles away in panic when the door on his side opens. His gimp arm jogs; the pain is nauseating.

“Get the fuck away from me!”

“Calm down, Sam,” Dean sounds exasperated, “I gotta fix your arm and we’re not doing it out here in the rain.”

“You’re not _real,”_ hisses Sam, back slammed against the steering wheel now, as far as he can go. Even through the rain and the general inscrutability, he thinks Dean flinches.

“You don’t get to say that,” is all Dean gives him. Which is about as general as Dean can get, and which Sam won’t take for an answer, so he pulls back out of reach again, miserably squeezed into the bench seat. When Dean reaches out again, Sam tries to go for his gun and ends up screaming in pain instead, surprised at how it sparks through his entire body.

“Stop being stupid, you stupid son of a bitch!”

 _Articulate_ , thinks Sam, dizzily. If Dean is a hallucination, at least it’s consistent with his personality. Sam gapes at him, unsure. Dean’s face is white, mouth pressed in a grim line. Presently Dean puts up his hands and climbs into the car. He murmurs something in a tiny, soft ghost of a voice. His body lines up against Sam’s, dripping water that sends intense shocks of awareness racing to Sam’s brain. Up close, Dean’s hair is wet, eyes older. But he looks _right_. He looks real.

“You want to hold a gun to my head?” asks Dean, fingers tangling in Sam’s shirt to shake him, gently. “Go ahead. If it makes you feel better. You’re fucking bleeding all over my car, so I’d fix you up even at gun-point. Seriously. One time offer.”

Sam coughs, licks his lips to taste bitter dust. Dean reaches around him to try and find his gun and Sam slaps his hand away.

 

“I don’t want to—,”Sam breathes out in a rush. “Is that really you?”

Dean rolls his eyes. “No. It’s your other brother. The ugly one.”

“Adam wasn’t that bad looking,” Sam whispers, dazed.

“Jesus. You asshole.”

Sam shrugs. There’s really no room to shrug in here, so he actually just ends up jabbing his shoulder against the wheel and winces. Dean squeezes the shoulder, and another lance of pain echoes the first. Sam grunts and slaps him off, but Dean just grins.

“You know how to tell real versus not real, brother. I taught you.”

Pain.

That’s the basis for a lot of things, isn’t it? Like a great magnetic center, _pain_ , and from it a network of nodes and lines, tangling through everything, birthing fear and grief and hate. At the center of Sam is Hell, of course, the pain of Hell like a bottomless reservoir, but there are other pains too. That gunshot wound he took for someone else. The knife scars he got throwing himself in front of monsters. Even the pain from his arm that he messed up fighting the Darkness’s creature.

Necessary pains. For those times when they were heroes.

And now Dean digs into the ruined flesh of his arm and Sam startles, eyes tearing, fingers scrabbling for Dean’s throat. Dean doesn’t jerk out of the way. He kisses Sam’s forehead. He lets Sam claw at him and try to get him to let up, but Sam’s crumpled into a small space and Dean’s pinning him down and Sam can’t get away—

“ _Real_ ,” Sam shouts, finally, “I get it! You’ve made your fucking point!”

“Then stop fighting me. Let me take care of you.”

Sam does. Dean pulls back, and then presses bloody fingers to Sam’s face, quickly, like a blessing in scarlet.

“I couldn’t find you,” he says. His voice is hoarse, cracking under the strain of keeping it steady. “Ten years, Sammy, I couldn’t find you. I couldn’t break away from her. But you’re here now, Sam, you’re here with me, and she can’t have me anymore.”

His arms come around Sam and suddenly Sam feels lighter, an almost dizzying sense of joy, and he breathes in salt and gunsmoke and _brother_.

***

**BEST WESTERN MOTEL**

**TONOPAH, NEVADA**

“Was he hiding you?”

“Who?”

“The Devil.”

 _Drip, drip, drip._ Sam focuses on bloody water, white tiles, and the ugly piss-yellow shower curtain. Dean’s using a scalpel to debride any gravel or sand off his arm, and the pain is sickening.

“I don’t know.”

There’s blood in rivulets on the floor, the pressure of Dean’s hand on his shoulder. Sam has one hand full of fabric; Dean’s shirt. It feels like he’s holding on for dear life at the edge of some precipice. Since the pipe seems out of commission, water cascades from the shower instead, warm and salt-tinged from the desert.

“Brace,” says Dean, and Sam grits his teeth. Whiskey on the wound— agony.

 Sam focuses on the lights in the bathroom, which are shaped like tulips. Each one shimmers in his hazy vision like diamonds.

Somewhere in the world is a crucible of grace being built to destroy the Darkness, and Castiel is putting it together jigsaw puzzle piece by piece. Somewhere in the world is also this space, warm mist and his brother’s voice, and a sense of elation he can’t help. All these years of lonely roads and nothing but voices in his head for company….and now _this_. One part of Sam wants to get away, run, go back to what he’s been doing. It’s so simple. He’s stronger now, from all the hauling and fighting and the angel-killing. Dean’s lost weight, lost muscle, will go down easy. And Sam’s world—his focus—wouldn’t change, would keep moving towards that possibility of entrapping the Darkness.

The monomania that’s kept him going.

The other part wants to hold onto Dean and never let go. The bigger part. The _much_ bigger part.

“Hey,” Dean shakes him. “You with me, Sammy? Help me get your jacket off.”

It’s harder than it should be. He sits, cramped against the shower curtain, wincing as they pull off his motorcycle jacket and then his t-shirt underneath, and Dean whistles like _oh boy, Sammy, oh jeez_.

“Did you have a run in with a wood chipper?”

Sam grunts. “Power grid, more like.”

Dean manhandles him to his feet, pushes him under the warm water, and holds him down when the water stings against the many welts and bruises. His fingers are everywhere. The dirty washrag is clean first, blood-stained later, and its coarseness is grounding somehow. There’s not much space here, and Dean’s knee is pressed against Sam’s side, his jeans dark with damp. Sam closes his eyes, teeth grit, feeling like his jaw might split.

“She calls it Pikachu.”

“ _What?_ ”

Dean snorts. “The…thing. Your power grid.”

“The Darkness named it after a Pokémon?” Sam frowns against the ignominy of calling that _thing_ after a yellow rat-hybrid…whatever. “Oh—wait, I get it. Electric type, ah, makes sense.”

Dean’s silent for a moment. And then he laughs, a short bark of a laugh, and his hand pats Sam’s shoulder, gently. It’s familiar in a way that’s almost distressing, and Sam feels like he’s about to break into a litany of things he’s stored up for this moment, _how_ and _why_ and _where_ , words like water behind a floodgate, too many questions engineered over too many lonely nights, but for once he can’t speak.

There are no words.

Dean’s t-shirt sticks to his skin, and the familiar Colt sits at his hip, and Sam closes his eyes. The spray hits his face, and Dean’s fingers knead up his spine, to rest softly against the nape of his neck.

“Turn around, Sammy. Let me see your back.”

Sam does. The water roars now, surreal in this wasted town, and Dean learns his wounds through it, one by one.

“Nothing me and a couple of Tylenol can’t fix,” he says, voice low.

 Sam shudders when Dean’s fingers brush the small of his back, relearning new wounds and old, all the stories told in scar tissue, and Sam feels the frisson shake through him and then he can’t stop it.

The shivers run through him like electric shocks. Sam leans his forehead against the wet, cold tiles and feels his body quake, helplessly. Something rises through him and sticks painfully in his throat. His eyes burn, the brass tulips all disappear, everything disappears.

“Hey,” Dean says, quietly, and then _hey_ again, and then he pulls Sam down and close, hands going around him, his lips pressing soft against the skin on Sam’s shoulder. “You’re okay. We’re okay, now, Sammy.”

***

Time.

Sam’s aware of it, slipping through his fingers like loose sand, time and the promise he’d made the Acolytes. Carson City. Twelve hours. How much of that time has he lost?

Everything is green in this room to some degree. The window sashes are green. They hang, flimsy and ephemeral, and the light that comes through them is green as dead skin, green as verdigris. It moves like fingers on the floor, and everything in the room glows with a subtle radioactivity. The opposite bed, littered with weapons and ammo and (fiercely) glossy magazines is bathed in seawater green. The single cross hanging above the cupboard unit glows with a sickly green halo.

Sam’s hair is dripping into the towel over the pillow, and his arm is in swathes of gauze. Everything is quiet—the desert night outside, the room inside. Their breathing is quiet, offset only by the _thwack-thwack_ of the table-top fan. Neon washes into the room, strange in the context of a gutted world.

Dean sits on the edge of his bed, fidgeting with a gun, until he stops and decides to climb in next to Sam instead. Sam looks—he does, even with the way his bones feel loose and his head heavy and softness all around him—he looks for traps. He looks for the small things that Dean wouldn’t do, the minutiae that doppelgangers forget to imitate. He runs his good hand over Dean’s shoulders, cups it around his face, thumb spanning Dean’s mouth while he says Sam’s name. He rubs the pads of his fingers over Dean’s collarbone, trying to find the old break there, the old scars and divots and imperfections that make up what he knows is his brother and no one else.

He can’t find fault. For all he can tell, this is his brother.

He asked for a miracle. Angrily, agnostically—he asked for a miracle.

 This is what he got.

“Where did you go?”

Dean smiles, dryly. “Have you met her?”

 “Amara. Yeah. Just recently, by the road, actually. Or in a dream. I’m not too clear on the details.”  

“How did she make you feel?”

Sam looks away, at the ceiling, with its water-dark maps of uncertain countries. One of them could look like Africa, in a wonky sort of way.

“Sam?”

“Yeah. Like she was holy.”

Dean nods. “For a long time, I couldn’t fight that.”

“How long?”

Dean hesitates. Sam props himself up on his good arm, makes sure Dean’s looking right at him, and demands the answer again.

“Until I heard you scream.”

“Now? With the…thing.”

“Yeah.”

Sam swallows. “Ten years, then.”

“I’m not—you don’t get it, Sam, I’m not a robot of the Darkness or something like that. I could _hear_ her, all the time, like a siren call, but I looked for you, and then I found out that you’d found a way to hide from her, and it hid you from _me_ —”

“Cas found a way. And I looked for you too.”

“I’ve been in this town awhile,” Dean looks away. “She doesn’t want me hurt.”

This town. Sam’s passed through this town how many times in these many years? He doesn’t even know. He’s lost count. And _all_ this time—

“So what _does_ she want?” he asks, to distract himself from the thought.

Dean says nothing.

They lie, facing each other, the cool air from the fan a whisper on Sam’s bare back, a smear of Sam’s blood still on Dean’s cheek.

Years and years ago, there was a day when Sam asked Dean about Hell. And another day, when he asked about Purgatory. And yet another, about that one case where Dean could do nothing but watch while people died around him, bear silent witness, crawl out of a trench with guilt etched all over his face.

This is that Dean. The Dean who wants to hide his torturer’s guise in Hell, the Dean who wants to hide his bloodlust in Purgatory, the Dean who’s afraid of being something more or less than human, afraid of transgressing beyond that definition of himself.

Sam knows this Dean. He hurts for this Dean. Sam’s pretty sure that they have wearied the word ‘love’, abused it to explain too many transgressions, but it is now that he feels it in his chest, big and blooming and too painful to touch.

“She’s too big, Sam,” says Dean, now, eyes still far away, “you couldn’t understand.”

“Okay,” Sam says, quietly. “I’ll take your word on that. What do _you_ want?”

 Dean looks up at him. Says, in a rush of breath, “You.”

***

Sam’s not sure how he falls asleep, but he does. In the morning he thinks he’ll wake up on the road somewhere, hurt and trying to hold onto the last vestiges of this dream, but instead he wakes up to sunshine and softness, Dean puttering about, humming a song Sam can’t place, and apparently tossing everything he owns into a duffel bag.

This is surreal enough that Sam sits up, too quick, feels both the pain from his mangled arm and the dizziness of blood rushing to his head at the same painful second. He grunts, leaning over to rest his forehead against his knees.

“Morning, sunshine.”

“What are you doing?”

“Getting out of here,” says Dean, conversationally. “I mean, no offence to Tonopah, but it ain’t no Vegas.”

Sam blinks, nonplussed. “No, I mean—the Darkness, what about—”

Dean shrugs, his back to Sam, his tone curiously light. “Let’s not stay around for her to get hold of me, again. Let’s just…go, man.”

“Where?”

“Wherever you—Carson City. You were delivering a package to Carson City, right?”

“Yes, but—”

“Sam.”

“Yeah.”

“Don’t you trust me?”

 _No,_ Sam wants to say. _No, this is a trick._ Lucifer’s trick, Amara’s trick—heck, it could be Cas’s trick. But in the next hour Dean sits on his bed, and Sam draws blood with silver knife, watches Dean drink holy water, smears a bloody charm on his forehead and waits for him to react. He doesn’t.  Gris-gris,  Quranic verses: Sam’s meticulous. With each thing, his hope surges, his heart, he feels a tremble in his skin like the vibration of a taut string, stretched to the point of plasticity. And at the end of it, Sam paces, tries all the Latin he knows, feels like he’s coming apart, because he so fiercely wants to _believe_ , but miracles don’t happen to Sam Winchester.

Miracles don’t happen.

This is a trick, somehow.

And in the midst of some weird Greek that Sam knows will dispel any faerie-like mesmer that could hide a monster, Dean grabs hold of his arm.

“Sam.”

“No, wait, this one’s—”

“ _Stop_. Sammy, please. Come here.”

The bloody forehead-charm smudges between them. Sam closes his eyes and lets Dean hold him, his breath warm on Sam’s cheek, his voice a prayer: _it’s me, it’s me._

“Please, Sammy. I need you to believe me,” Dean says, “We’ve both been played, but luck’s on our side for once, and we’ve got to get out of here. Before she realizes her thrall over me is broken. Before she comes after _you,_ now that you’re hidden from her—”

“I don’t—” starts Sam, tasting salt on his lips, that strange fruit-peel tang of fear.

“You drive. We’ll throw all the guns in the back—I can even toss in my Colt—”

“No, Dean. Christ. I know you’re not going to drive us into a Joshua tree or something, I checked every ward—”

Dean’s brows rise. _Why are we still here then,_ he seems to say, and Sam swallows, his mouth dry from fear or the acrid air—he can’t say for sure.

“Okay,” says Sam, shakily, “Okay.”

***

In Carson City, the Acolytes receive the package with a curt nod and a promise to pass the message to Cas. Everything’s new to Dean: he’s suspicious of the Acolytes first, doesn’t get the idea of anyone worshipping Castiel as the savior of mankind against the Darkness.

Castiel, Dean says, only half-joking, hasn’t been a savior for a while now. ( _None of us have, Sam.)_

“Well, in the last ten years he’s done some good.”

“And you trust what he’s doing?”

“Dean. It’s Cas.”

Dean chuckles, with some fond memory. “Sometimes that worries me.”

Cas is a lot of things: his mystery missions and weird new cult following are things beyond Sam’s understanding. Sometimes his messages are strange, giving away nothing, simple orders to follow, and Sam can’t predict what Cas will actually deliver. He can’t predict what Cas will take either. It’s like suddenly Cas has room for many different definitions—angel, angel-killer, God, warrior—and he holds or shares his knowledge and his companionship as he wills it. To be associated with Cas these days is to submit to his vagaries, his strange missions, his lack of showing up.

Sam would’ve been pissed about this, this lack of transparency and this attack-dog crap that he puts Sam through sometimes, but at least Cas gives him something to do while he’s off doing whatever in Bolivia.

“Bolivia?” Dean is incredulous. “Wow, is he MIA much?”

“Barely see him,” says Sam, leaning against the side of the Impala. “I think it’s because he knows I’m speaking to the Devil.”

Dean frowns. “So…what? According to what you told me, he brokered that deal. He thinks it’s contagious?”

“Wouldn’t anyone?”

“Are you still—”

“No.”

“Why did you agree to it in the first place?”

Sam shrugs. “Dying men clutches at straws. So do those who feel suddenly useless. I didn’t let him…control me or anything. Even Lucifer’s big on clauses and conditions. I mean, he hates free will, doesn’t think we should have a cosmic veto or something, but he—can’t wear me anymore. I made sure of that.”

Lucifer has been quiet since Sam got attacked. It’s strange, sometimes, not to have that constant horrendous reminder of what he’s once been. A bad kind of strange. It gnaws at his insides: this crawling, insidious ghost of something powerful. The Devil can’t give up that easily. Sometimes when they’re quiet, he finds himself foraging for that snake coiled somewhere deep inside of him. Maybe he’ll even feel better if he finds it: an awful, charcoal-dark relief.

It’s like Stockholm Syndrome, only it’s happening in his head.

“What’s in the package?”

Sam kneels to dust sand off his jeans’ knees. “Grace.”

“The Darkness can be destroyed with Grace?”

“A whole lot of it. In Turkmenistan, actually. That’s where Cas’s weapon is. But that’s not why we’re delivering _this_ package. The Acolytes need it to hold fort against Amara’s creatures.”

Dean’s quiet for a moment. And then he says, “Turkmenistan.”

“Yeah. I’ve seen it.”

Dean whistles, low in his throat.

“Where now?”

Sam raises a brow. “Wait. I call the shots now?”

Dean looks over the landscape, which looks mostly gutted, hardpan flatness and collapsed interstates all abounding. “I wouldn’t trust myself not to lead you back straight to her.”

“You wouldn’t,” says Sam, with as much confidence as he can muster. “You wouldn’t do that, Dean. It’s not in you.”

“That’s what you always say.”

“Well, huh. You’ve never proved me wrong.”

Dean throws him a zero-wattage smile, and takes shotgun seat. Sam tosses the keys once from hand to hand, considers if it’ll be a gesture of trust if he hands them over to Dean. His fingers tighten around them, though, hard edges biting into his palm.

It’s been ten years.

Maybe they’re not there yet.

***

In the next week, Sam and Dean hunt strange creatures that Amara Created. Almost all of them, Sam finds to his dismay, are named after Pokémon. They take down a rogue angel in Pennsylvania, nearly going blind themselves in the process, and stay that night in an abandoned roadhouse where they curl up together on the floor, against the unnatural cold and the wind trumpeting up and down the street. It sounds like a jazz funeral.

Sam keeps the bottle of Grace from the dead angel between them, and also a knife, and he lets Dean touch him only in sporadic spurts, seeing the Darkness or Lucifer at work whenever Dean reaches for him.

These years have been lonely. The road has been long. Sam flinches from touch even when he wills himself not to, misses the impersonal encounters with the Acolytes and the sin churches and occasionally even Cas. He’s found Dean, but it feels like he’s been cast adrift.

Lost, at sea— hopeless without a paddle.

He pulls away when Dean tries to bridge the gap between them, and hates the way Dean winces at that.

They drive. The new normalcy begins to settle in. Sam misses his bike, but the Impala is home, the wheel in his hands as familiar as his own self. He and Dean talk, ten years of catching up, of the Devil and the Darkness and the way the world went dark. It’s painful but also relieving, and when they fall asleep at night, they lie close together, waiting for something to drag them apart again.

Back in Tucson at the Barking Deer, near to where they’ve just taken down another of Amara’s beings, Sam leaves the Impala’s keys on the table when he heads out. He feels Blake’s eyes on him, on Dean: her fear and her mistrust and her fear for Sam.

 Dean takes a while to follow him, and when he climbs into the driver’s seat his smile almost reaches his eyes.

“You sure?”

Sam nods, his eyes on the road. “If you wanted to kill me, I’d be dead already.”

They go west, get to the coast; places Sam hasn’t been to in years. Every store is looted, every street mostly abandoned: life has moved into quieter places, hideouts, speakeasy-like bars where newcomers draw suspicion and hostility. They stay in a bar one night and Sam feels eyes on them, multiplied manifold by the facets on his glass. He drinks to ignore them, ignore the prickling at the nape of his neck from the combined malignant force of all those glares. Crystal glimmers behind the counter, growing brighter the more they drink, the musical clink of glasses and Aretha Franklin on the jukebox abstract backgrounds to time slipping through their fingers: seconds and minutes and hours.

For some time, Sam forgets the state of the world. For some time, all that exists is this.

They stumble up, tiny room above, barely gets the door closed before Dean’s pushing him against a wall, sloppy kisses against Sam’s mouth, and all Sam can slur out is _I dreamed about you, all these years I dreamed about—_ and he doesn’t know what’s happening anymore, except that Dean’s right here, the Devil’s quiet, the Darkness outside these doors, and he kisses back. Dean’s mouth is warm, he tastes of whiskey, he moans when Sam nips at his tongue, lightly.

And when Dean goes for the buttons of his shirt, the buckle of his belt, a wave of doubt crashes inside Sam: this could still be a trick.

This could still be Amara, or Lucifer, or—

Or he would let Dean fuck him and find out none of this was real. It would be a stranger.

It takes effort to form words: his head is thick and spongy, mouth gasping, but he gets it out.

  _No._

Dean shushes him; his fingers splayed over Sam’s cheek now, his eyes warm. _It’s just me._ His face looks waxy, like a mask, poorly fitted. Sam can probably peel it off with his fingernail, but what would he find beneath? _It’s okay, Sammy,_ Dean says. He kisses Sam again, harder, and now panic settles in and Sam shoves at Dean. Everything blurs around him, the room and the ceiling and Dean, his bruising insistence, and his face that’s suddenly something different—a glow, a ghostly radiance—

Or maybe Sam’s imagining it.

“No,” he says again.

Sam’s not sure. Of anything.

He pushes Dean away, grabs the wall to stand up, and thinks he sees a woman at the corner of the room even as Dean tries to reassure him, soft words that mean nothing, _Sammy-Sammy-Sammy_. _You just have to trust me._

The litany of his childhood, the song of innocence.

But still Dean’s touch wanders, down Sam’s chest, between his legs, and Sam twists away, stumbles, out the door and into a corridor that telescopes madly, reality breaking apart like taffy pulled too taut: here’s a road, here’s the desert, here’s the stairs leading down to the bar, here’s his own blood in a pool. Here’s a board too unclear to read, but maybe it reads _Tonopah, 0._ Here’s Dean, coming after him, and here’s the sky, choked with dark clouds and an empty space where the moon should be.

Here’s his bike, the Impala, a bridge, a crossroads.

Here’s a doorway at which he stands, himself, half-silhouetted and naked, and Sam watches as a woman’s hands circle around him from behind, her face only half-glimpsed, his own face expressionless as a wax mask, and she drags him backward into the darkness.

 _The_ Darkness.

Sam twists around, too quickly, and loses his footing. He topples down a set of stairs, copper and salt filling his mouth the second he lands, concrete scraping his back, and in a moment Dean’s there, shouting, _what the fuck, what the fuck did you do that for_ and Sam has no idea, seriously, he’s probably over-reacting. Or having a panic attack. Or both.

 _Fucking Bolivia,_ he thinks vaguely, blaming whatever started this whole frigging mess, and then everything disappears.

***

In the morning Dean is apologetic. Sam is relatively unscathed except for a hangover and a bitten tongue, and mostly just embarrassed. _Can’t come to terms with having you back,_ he says. _Lucifer,_ he says. Dean blanches at the suggestion of the Devil and what that’s done to Sam’s reactions to sex, which would have been terrible enough, except Dean also decides to walk out the door, which is even _more_ terrible.

Sam curls up in his bed and nurses his headache and tries to quiet sneaking suspicions about his brother. He makes more wards, and then he rubs them off again, because he’s already tried them all. It’s not fair. Not fair to Dean, who had in fact given fair warning to Sam long ago that _exactly_ this could happen between him and Amara. And hadn’t Sam broken out of Lucifer’s control once? Dean had been suspicious of Lucifer still being Sam’s co-passenger when he was soulless, but Dean had not been paranoid.

Benefit of the doubt. Sam’s the expert at that. But he looks at the calluses on his palms from his years of biking, and tastes skepticism like bitter wine.

Dean comes back in a while with crackers and a half-decent cheeseburger and the sunny disposition of having swept a whole lot of things under a metaphorical rug. Sam eats what’s edible, because his head hurts and it’s something to do, and approves of the sunny disposition. He likes the way Dean just sits next to him—not close enough to touch, but close enough for Sam to observe him.

Sam’s quiet. _Lucifer would show him real_ , he thinks. Or maybe not: maybe this is what Lucifer promised when he said Sam was going to have a hell of a ride. Or maybe this is what Amara meant. Or maybe this is just Dean, and this is his miracle, and Sam’s too fucked up to take a good thing offered to him on a platter.

He doesn’t know anymore.

The afternoon sun slants into the room in rays that look like Morse code. Dean pats Sam’s shoulder, gets off the bed, and packs their bags. When they leave the bar, in search of something else to kill, Sam presses his head against the window of the Impala and dozes. He dreams of Amara again— _I could give you everything_ —and wakes up to Dean shaking him.

Rain slams the windshield, dirty and toxic and red, and the sea crashes somewhere outside. They’re near a beach.

“Nine’o’clock, your side.”

Something large. It stands on two legs. But something is wrong with it, something in the way it hunches, the way when it raises its arms it’s all wrong-shaped and goes clickety-clack like a giant insect. Sam can hear the sound of it from this far away, through the rain, a plaintive fractured wail like a dirge in some dead language. It’s an incredibly lonely sound. He shivers. The clickety-thing scrapes pincers across the sand, letting waves wash over its segmented, chitinous feet.

“Don’t call it Squirtle,” Sam mumbles, vague sense of desperation about it, rubbing at his eyes. “Please, just don’t.”

“I don’t know what it is,” says Dean. “Anyway, Squirtles are supposed to be kinda cute, aren’t they. This thing looks anything but.”

“Uh, I don’t think Amara was keeping cuteness as a consideration while naming her monsters.”

They sit in the car for a few quiet seconds, listening to the dinging of the engine and the scratchy sound of a Blondie tape on low volume. She’s eating Cadillacs in that one and turning phrases about Rapture.

 _Rapture,_ thinks Sam. What a fucking joke.

“Hey, Sam,” asks Dean, finally, “Why do we know so many Pokémon?”

Sam thinks back, trying to rack his memories. “You know what. I actually have no idea.”

It feels good to smile with Dean.

It also feels good to fight, their guns raining bullets and Sam’s machete slashing through the monster’s head, Dean kicking it into the waves that immediately turn black. They disassemble the body—it is all black guts and some weird tar-like shit, not ectoplasm but maybe close. The glop runs in slimy rivulets down Sam’s arms, and Dean gets a laugh out of Sam’s disgust.

“As prissy as ever,” he says, dancing away from Sam’s indignant attempt to flick the stuff at him.

“Ugh, what’s this?” Sam asks, fishing something that looks like an alarm clock from all the glop. It actually _is_ one, he realizes, under all the veiny black stuff encasing it.

“Ticking heart. She has a sense of humor.”

“Fuck, that’s twisted.”

They haul the bits and pieces to the sea, lets the waves wash away the _monster_ - _blegh_ as Dean calls it. And then they go back to sit on the hood of the Impala. The stars in the sky are few and far between. The dark space between them seems darker than ever, but it feels like old times. Before Sam started out alone. Before the road became endlessly weary, and he stopped noticing that the world had any more beauty to spare.

“Do you think Cas will come if you pray?”

Dean’s expression is inscrutable. “I’ve tried. Nope. Do you think his plan will work?”

“I hope so. We’ve been working years—”

“Where did he figure out how to get rid of the Darkness?”

Sam shrugs. “I don’t really know. He said that’s how God and the archangels bound her the first time. With a weapon of Grace. And Lucifer gave some information…”

“So Cas and the Devil are conferring.”

“I don’t know, Dean. All I’ve been doing are his errands and the occasional hunts. Monsters didn’t simply disappear just because you did.”

Sam thinks that’ll get a rise out of Dean—it’s unfair, for sure, Sam’s said himself that Dean had had no choice in the matter, but this is _Dean,_ after all—and he’s surprised when Dean simply shrugs.

“I mean—,” starts Sam, and then shakes his head. “Sorry.”

“No. _I’m_ sorry for leaving you alone to do this thing, Sam.”

 “I had fair warning. And we’re—okay, now.”

Dean nods. His hand finds Sam’s and squeezes, gently. Sam doesn’t let go.

***

They go east again.

The season transitions: rain seems to follow them, runs with their blood when they take down more monsters. Cas doesn’t call. The Devil stays silent. Sam wakes from dreams of walking on the road, aimless and bleeding, unable to find the Triumph. The blue-robed Acolytes don’t call, either.

It’s almost a vacation, if not for the hunting on the side.

 _Don’t tell me any details about the plan to destroy her,_ Dean whispers to Sam one night. Sam’s not sure what to say to that. He nods, and steers clear of places where the Acolytes could be. They pass Sin Churches: gather supplies and ammunition and booze.

Somewhere in the middle of a night, with Dean driving and Sam dozing off the hardship of their last hunt, he has a dream of Nevada again. Waking up in the bathtub in the _Best Western_ —Tonopah. His eyes don’t focus well, but the water is bloody. The tiles on the wall, stained with bloody handprints, shift and swim like glass in a kaleidoscope. His head falls back, and there’s a mirror, and Lucifer says _wake up, Sam, wake up._ The Devil looks like him. Sam looks away, gasping, clawing weakly at the sides of the tub, and something closes around his throat: a hand.

 _Stay down_ , says Dean. His eyes are strange, rippling with moth-wings. Their bodies slip and slide against the sides of the tub when Sam struggles. Dean puts his hand over Sam’s mouth to silence him, and then his lips. Possession is inherently sexual, and Sam feels it like an electric spark, a possession unlike any other. He can’t breathe, it feels dizzying—like flying—and he’s screaming at Dean, except this is _not_ Dean, not what Sam’s brother used to be, but something else. An instrument of the Darkness, a honed tool—

Something crashing against his ear is what wakes Sam.

“Sorry, Sleeping Beauty,” smirks Dean, “bumpy ride.”

Sam thinks he feels guilt that he can’t suspend his disbelief about Dean, but also fear. Caution. He looks across the car at Dean, constantly, triangulating the bits and pieces and words that make up this person. He probes, questions, but Dean’s always been good at avoiding Sam’s questions, and he isn’t super forthcoming now. 

They hear rumors from rest-stops and bars, head to Arizona again, and finds a congregation of people worshipping the Darkness. There’s a church where the altar has been destroyed, replaced with a pedestal, and on it stands a woman, naked but for the blood of chickens with which she’s been anointed, and she howls as shadows dance and a man moves forward to mount her.

Their coupling is wild, almost animalistic. The soles of the woman’s feet, bathed in red, mark the man’s broad back. They scream and grunt; the voices echo in the quiet of the church like the corridors of Hell.

 _We seek the truth_ , is what they scream. _We seek the truth._

Sam watches, horrified yet darkly fascinated, as the man produces a fetish of some sort, brassy figurine-like something draped in a strip of red silk, and proceeds to try and push it inside the woman. She roars; her need something like agony. It’s primitive.

It’s almost beautiful.

He looks around at Dean and his face is that wax-mask again, that unreal thing, that flutter of shadowy wings in his gaze.

Dean turns away. “They’re people, Sammy. We can’t do anything.”

Their motel room that night is dark; the bed lumpy.

He can’t really see Dean but as a dark blot, but he can hear him—Dean and the copious chugging of whole taxonomies of alcohol. They’re going to be running out soon, and then they’ll need to find some other sin church. But for now here’s a suspended moment, just him and Dean, and the psycho-virulent strand of that dizzying congregational spectacle swimming through Sam’s blood like an actual physical memory.

“It’s not—sex and sacrifice and that whole gory Exorcist crap is not her jam,” says Dean, “I don’t know why they—”

 _All that is the Devil’s jam_ , thinks Sam. Sex, and blood, and violence. They’ve seen young women speaking in multiple tongues after violent virginal sex; young men snapping and brutalizing their partners after homosexual intercourse. The stories suggest that’s how you get closer to the Devil, if you were to believe in all the stories, or if you were Sam. He thinks he hears a ghostly chuckle at that, but the barrier between his own thoughts and hallucinations have stretched pretty thin over the years, and he can’t say for sure.

“Have you ever,” he asks, “you know…with her?”

Dean is mute for some time.

“Does it matter?”

Sam shrugs. A vehicle rumbles past on the interstate and yellow lights spill in strips for a handful of seconds. Outside is nothing but scrub and desert, the moon taking a sabbatical somewhere amidst the black cloud cover. A coyote howls somewhere, and its cries are redoubled until there’s a desert orchestra: all these animal symphonies that thrum through Sam’s blood and turns him on at some visceral, primordial level.

He sits up and Dean reaches for the lamp sitting on the table between them.

Sam grabs hold of his hand in the darkness. “No.”

“No, what?”

“Don’t turn on the lights.”

Dean obliges. Sam sits in the dark awhile, and then can’t think over the tumble of strange emotions in his head. He goes out instead, the door closing with a loud _click_ behind him.

The walkway lamps along the L-shaped motel corridor are off, casting the whole place in a pristine, primeval darkness. _Appropriate,_ thinks Sam, hurrying along, propelled by the cold and the uneasiness that sits deep in his gut. There are no cars in the parking lot except for the Impala, no lights on even in the office. In a far corner, where the motel rooms end and an immeasurable wasteland begins, sits a vending machine spewing ghostly green light.

Sam starts towards it, and then turns on his heel instead. He goes back to the room, stands in the shadows for a while. Then he goes to Dean, coaxes him to bed. It doesn’t take much effort. They fall across it, and Sam undresses him, all reason eclipsed by whatever strangeness has crawled into him back at that church. The fierceness of his want is almost excruciating, the pressure of such magnitude that his head spins. Dean murmurs in his ear, sounds almost not like English but a cruder tongue, but Sam doesn’t care anymore. Can’t care anymore. He licks a stripe down Dean’s neck, kisses his mouth, his collarbone.

Dean makes a low sound and drags his hands down Sam’s side, nails pressing in sharp against Sam’s skin. Sam fumbles with his jeans, trying to get them off, while Dean gets a hand in his hair, pulling him close for a hard, fast kiss.

Sparks in his brain: he feels alive, a surge of some strange, brutal hunger clawing up and down through him. His palm presses down hard against Dean’s cock, and Dean grunts and rolls atop Sam. Sam’s pulse stutters and he closes his eyes, kicks off his jeans and hooks his calves around Dean’s hips, locking him in, pinning him down against Sam.

Something stutters to life inside him, and he trembles violently. He arches into the pressure of Dean’s fingers inside of him. Reality comes apart like a taffy pull. The darkness of this motel room transcends into the green flimsy landscape of the Best Western. The water-blackened wonky-Africa slips in and out of his vision.

 _Where do miracles come from?_ Sam grabs hold of Dean’s shoulders, digs his nails in, pulls Dean deeper into him, but can’t look at his eyes. Dean drives into him without love, mercilessly; pleasure unfolds in Sam’s brain like an acid-pill rush. His elbow slams into the wall behind them, and the pain only heightens this, this feeling like _here it is,_ the be-all and end-all, the summoning of something old and dark and savage.

( _What do you want, Dean?_ Sam knew the answer, had heard it just a few days ago, but oh, the question lingers as though incomplete. _What do you want?_ You. You.)

Sam flips them over, gasping, gets on top and grinds down against Dean; in his skull, the blood-rush is fireworks, rockets. It’s ungentle and it hurts, and lights flash behind his eyes, and the pressure of Dean’s hand on his dick is almost torture. They roll over again. Sam closes his eyes, lets Dean fuck into him so hard the mattress forms a cave around them. His blood pounds, his body twists. The grace of them is almost bestial.

And inside his head a switch flicks. The moment of his climax is the Devil’s byway in, the loss of his own foothold over the nooks and crannies of his soul, and Sam lets him in.

Lucifer says, _now, open your eyes NOW_.

Sam does.

And the thing with the moth-wing eyes, the thing that looks like Sam’s brother, that maybe once was, reaches down to devour his soul.


	4. The Inbetween

**0 HOURS, 15 MINUTES**

**TONOPAH, NEVADA**

Too many things happen at once.

Sam struggles to push Dean off him. A glare of blue flickers to the left of them, and Castiel throws them both off the bed and against the wall. Sam rolls away, watches Cas speak something in Enochian, hears Dean reply in some other language.

No: not Dean. Something else.

Something that consumes souls, just like the Darkness.

Sam pulls his jeans back on, his jacket; eyes on the conversation all the time.

This is the _Best Western_. He’s still bleeding from the assault on the road, wet from the bath, and the bed-sheets are soaked in red. His clothes smell of motor oil and bike-grease, and his thighs still chafe from the Triumph’s leather seat digging into his skin.

The miracle is over.

“What do I say,” says Castiel, looking at Sam now, “I’m partial to his soul. You just can’t have it.”

Amara flickers in the shadows of the room, casts them aside like a coat when she steps into the light. “I can’t truly have Dean until I have Sam, Lucifer Morningstar,” Amara says. She smiles, throwing open her arms, “Oh, I know it’s you—I see right through you.”

“I would have expected nothing less,” says Castiel. Or what used to be Castiel. _Lucifer,_ Sam’s mind reels, it all makes sense now, the deal brokering and the silences and the weird missions—“Anyway, you can’t eat up Sam Winchester’s soul. He’s mine. We go _way_ back.”

“I know all about that,” says Amara, her face suspended in blackness.

Sam stands up, struggling against the waves of pain radiating off his shoulder and arm. He blinks and some objects start to appear hyper-real, while the others get subsumed by darkness. The door’s there, thrumming with purple radiation that he can feel vibrating in his teeth. Sam moves toward it, feeling like a passenger in his own body, an automaton set to follow precise motions. He thinks of somehow dragging Dean along with him, and decides against it. Amara won’t let Dean be hurt. Lucifer doesn’t care enough either way. Sam wouldn’t know what to do with him.

Lucifer’s still talking.  “I hid him from you all these years, and I shall keep him hidden.”

Amara laughs. “The last time we met, face to face, you were the First Beloved. The Golden Son. Now look at you, cast away, just like me. Why do you fight me, Lucifer? We have one common enemy.”

Lucifer smiles. It’s horrible, on Castiel’s face, that familiar smirk.

“There’s only place for one of us on His earth,” he says. “And considering how these boys went to such great trouble to jump me from my Cage, I think I should make an effort, shouldn’t I?”

“You could try. What have you achieved in these ten years? Some blind followers, some silly weapon that you think will work against me—”

Lucifer clears his throat. “Correction. That I _know_ will work against you.”

There’s bright light, all of a sudden, intense white. Sam throws his good hand over his eyes, collapses at the high-pitched shrieking that bores through his ears and strikes at a secret place somewhere deep. He curls against it, hot tears of pain wetting his face, and is lost for a while.

He dreams of a normal day. Getting up, getting dressed, and driving somewhere. Dean sings a song that he doesn’t know—it sounds very high-pitched and Sam thinks of bats, troughs and peaks, being found out by SONAR. He wants to flee from it, but this is a dream, and so he stays. He smiles till his teeth shatter from the sound. Then the door to the car opens on his side and he falls out, into darkness sticky and wet that flows through his skin. Something grabs hold of his heart and pulls—and Sam should be horrified, horrified that he actually knows this precise pain—and replaces it with something covered in black goo. An alarm clock. 

And then he wakes up on the floor.

Amara’s gone. Sunlight’s shining into the room, and Cas stands at the centre of it, grinning. Sam almost says his name, says _Cas,_ and then remembers the deception.

Lucifer. This is _Lucifer._

“You’ve been very useful,” Lucifer tells him now, “Without that package of Grace, your soul would’ve been consumed by her and I couldn’t have done a thing to stop her.”

Sam coughs and tastes blood. “Is she…”

“She’s left the room. She’ll be back—this is nothing but a skinned knee to her, a shock to the system.”

“The weapon—”

“It’s real, Sam. So is our deal. You’ve been of invaluable help—the Darkness wants your soul so your brother doesn’t war against her. She’s spent a good deal of time looking for you while you drove right under her nose, and so she never saw what I’ve got brewing for her. Or me.”

Sam struggles to his feet, holding the door for support.  “She knows now.”

“Yeah, small detail,” Lucifer waves his hand dismissively. “We’ll move it—the magic of perpetuity could be found elsewhere. Centralia, maybe. Jharia, in India. Or I’ll move it into Phlegethon, in Hell, where the fires burn forever. My offer still stands for you, though—third time asking.”

“You’ll keep hiding me from her. For real.”

“Of course,” says Lucifer. “I don’t lie. Not to you.”

“Will it hide me from Dean, as well?”

Lucifer makes a clucking noise. “Oh, Sam. You saw it for yourself. Dean’s not Dean anymore.”

“I could save him.”

“I highly doubt that.”

Sam takes a deep breath. “I could try.”

In a second, he’s somewhere else. A noxious black, a cancerous, mindless organic suspension within which swims an incalculable number of strangers. Their screams and laughs and voices are visions here, red and white and purple, brightening and dimming in the sea of nothing. Sam can’t discern their faces, only plastic waxy masks like a grotesque masquerade line. He twists, every direction, looking for something familiar to move towards, but he sinks instead, in the malignant sentience of this all-dark.

Lucifer snaps his fingers and the room comes back. “That’s what the Darkness is like. Thank me for the free demo. Now, tell me, Sam. Do you really think you can find _any_ soul in there?”  

Sam’s quiet. “Maybe he’s not there.”

“Stop insulting your own intelligence.” Lucifer walks closer to him. “And let me make this easy for you. Say _yes,_ we’ll do exactly what we’ve been doing. Work together. Bring her down.”

Sam backs off, good hand thrown out in front of him. “What we’ve been doing is built on a lie.”

“Castiel’s lie. Not mine! I never told you specifically that I _was_ your angel, did I?”

“ _No_ ,” Sam says, steadily. “Third time saying no. I’ll find my own way.”

A spark of rage flickers through Lucifer. He raises his hand and Sam flinches, involuntarily and despite himself. It is operant conditioning: he expects violence from the Devil, and violent pain. He closes his eyes and says, on an exhale, “And now you have really no reason to keep me alive, do you?”

“I don’t think so,” says Lucifer. He takes a step toward Sam, eyes shining an unearthly blue, and that’s when Sam rams his bloody hand against a banishing sigil.

**0 HOURS, 2 MINUTES**

**TONOPAH, NEVADA**

Sam leaves Dean—or whoever this is—crumpled there on the ground. He’s dizzy from blood loss, weak-kneed, and outside, the wind’s holding its breath. He’s not sure what he’s going to do next. Not sure if he _has_ a next. He has to save Dean; has to warn the Acolytes about the Devil. He has to save Cas too, if Cas wants saving. There are a lot of _has to-s_ , and him stranded in the middle of the desert.

He has to find a vehicle. A working car, a bike—anything will do. There are protective sigils that he can use to disappear temporarily. He has to get to the bunker, risk running into the Devil there, to find better wards. He has to stay alive. There’s no one left anymore to pick up all these loose ends.

The sky’s still blue, but there’s both the sun and the moon up there. The asphalt’s smoking. Or maybe it’s not; maybe Sam just thinks it is.

Sam kneels on the ground for a few seconds, trying to orient his spinning head.

“Sam!”

Sam stands, turns around. Dean’s got a sawed off, a heavy gun, and his eyes are his own.

His gaze is his own.

Sam tries to clamp down on the agony of hope.

“Dean?”

“Yeah,” mumbles Dean, sounding almost surprised at himself, “Yes.”

“You can fight her off,” Sam says, taking a few steps backward, his good hand going to rest on his own gun. “Come on, Dean.”

“It doesn’t matter,” says Dean. He sounds far-away, as though talking takes effort. “Nothing matters anymore, Sammy. There’s no one left that you can help. I can’t let the Devil or the Darkness have you.”

“They won’t. We’ll fight this, Dean,” Sam says. His pulse rockets but his skin feels cold, the world grinding to a halt around them.

“Whatever’s east is hungry. Whatever’s west is dead. You can’t run anywhere. You’ll just get caught.”

“I can. _We_ can. You’ve fought off worse, man, you have to try.”

A flicker of moths; a smirk. And then a collapse again, or relapse: Dean shudders and a tear runs down his face. “I’ve thought about this for a long time. This really is the best way, Sammy.”

The barrel of his gun shines red from the sun behind him.

“I’m so proud of you, brother,” says Dean. “Just stay still.”

Sam draws his gun at the same time.

 “Just hold still,” Dean says again, “Everything will be better in a moment.”

Sam holds his breath, good arm trembling with the weight of his gun. “Dean, please—”

 

 

Dean shoots him.

Twice in the chest. That he feels, reels backward, and lets the gun clatter out of his arm and into the hard earth. Blood rushes into his mouth; his head slams into the ground. Flashes of fractal light in his vision—they can’t be stars, he thinks, can’t be fireworks either.

Dean walks toward him, stands over him, haloed in sunlight, tears shining bright as diamonds. His gun levels with Sam’s head. His tears fall on Sam’s skin, his cheek, the warmth vaguely astonishing.

Sam has a second to hear Dean cry out _sorry, Sammy, I’m so sorry,_ and he hears a third shot, the loudest of them all.

And then nothing.


	5. The Grey Interlude/After

**THE GRAY INTERLUDE**

Everything is colorless.

Peaceful and perfect, like a snow-globe.

There’s a room that Sam finds, and it’s grey. Ashes blow in, day and night, catches on his clothes. It is cold, but the color on the TV warms the room sometimes. There’s nothing on, just color, and the color has no name. Sam puts his fingers against the TV sometimes to warm them.

There’s a sofa, spewing stuffing like a geyser, and all the windows are broken. The curtains hang heavy with the ash.

Sometimes there’s rain, quiet pitter-patter.

It takes him time to realize that there are tears running down his face, constant stream, and they’re not his. They’ve been lost, and he’s found them, just like this place. He tries to scrape them off his face but that doesn’t work. Sometimes they feel hot on his face, scalding, sometimes cold; but mostly it’s comforting. Like a reminder of something too soft and blurred at the edges to really matter.

It’s perfect.

He curls up on the sofa and watches a tree twine through the ceiling. Its leaves are black, curly. The stem is silvered, like something exquisite. Then the tree grows eyes and a nose and two arms and legs, and becomes a woman.

“You remember me,” she says. “Billie.”

Sam doesn’t remember her. He turns his face away, and she goes away too.

He doesn’t remember a lot of things. Sometimes he thinks he should write it down, whatever he does remember, but he can’t see through the tears and he forgets to write anyway.

There’s just the steady stream of ash drifting through the windows, and the sofa, and the buzz of the TV. He looks at the TV buzzing its steady bright color-without-a-name. The day it shows something else, Sam thinks, will be a miracle.

He writes that word with ash on the wall.

It fades every day, and he has to re-make it. He thinks of adding other words, but none seem to matter.

The woman named Billie visits from time to time. She brings artifacts: broken things, cassette tapes, a snapped violin. These things pile at the corners of the room and get buried under ash. He doesn’t know what Billie is feeling sorry for, or if she thinks he’s bored—he’s not. Stray thoughts crawl up to him like cats, lazy and unreal. The color on the TV is kind of addictive.

“I didn’t really want you to end up here,” says Billie, when she visits. “But now you’re done, Sam. For better or for worse.”

Sam looks at her. He’s confused. “What are you talking about?”

There’s nowhere else he’d rather be, he thinks. This is peaceful. This is nothing.

Time passes. Some more words surface. _Love_ is a big word, shaped like a fruit. _War_ is another, synonymous with ash. _Brother_ is the taste of the indelible mark left on him, which streams from his eyes in silver tracks.

One day the TV stops working. Sam misses the buzz, but only for a little time. When it comes back on, there are faces in it. Multiple faces. They flit by, one by one, none staying for too long for him to remember or identify it. Sam goes closer to the set, puts his hand against the glass, and finds it ripples. Maybe his hand will go through it.

Maybe _this_ is his miracle.

“Where do miracles come from?” he asks the TV set. The faces on the set flicker like a reel. Sam reaches to touch it and falls back, something like a shock surprising him.

All his memories rush back, a deluge, brutal battering. He gasps, falls forward on his hands, tries to breathe through the years and years that feel like knife-wounds, the knife twisting inside him again and again. The pale ghosts of gunshot wounds to his chest and forehead bloom and disappear again.

He watches the precise moment when his hair turns windblown and tangled; the point when his eyes are his own again, older than his age and dark with everything he’s seen.

Sam hasn’t felt like himself in a long while. It’s an awful kind of relief.

Sam kneels, and the faces whisper. _Do you want to go back?_

“I have to—I have to go back. There are people who need me, still.”

Blake. Nadira. The Acolytes, as deceived as him. Cas, and Dean, who can still be saved. He can find a way. There’s always a way.

The tree on the ceiling slinks into the shape of the woman. She stands, in the middle of the room, her expression inscrutable.

“It’s Him,” Billie breathes. She nods at the set as if it speaks to her alone, a strange and silent conversation. And then she turns to Sam, an eyebrow raised. “You just can’t stay dead, can you?”

 “I thought you said nothing escapes the Empty,” Sam says, quietly.

“Free pass,” Billie says, eyes still on the TV set. “Have your miracle.”

The flickering faces disappear, to be replaced by a door. He could probably go through it. It would be like a Japanese horror movie, but he’s seen stranger things.

“What will happen to this place?”

Billie comes to stand by him.

 “Everything is temporary,” Billie says. “Sometimes even eternities collapse.”

The artifacts in the corner of the room catch fire. The floor gets hotter, and the tears that aren’t Sam’s fall from his eyes and sizzle. Everything is hot, but not painful.

Everything is holy.

Everything is ashes.

“Well, go on, Sam Winchester,” says Billie. She’s smiling, just a little. “Save the world one last time.”

**AFTERDEATH**

Sam wakes up.

Shadows scamper like wounds on the ground, and all around him is quietness and a stillness the likes of which he’d never known before. Insects swarm and buzz their rough sandpaper song.

The rocky hills that rise in the distance are a chiaroscuro of light and shadow, scrimp slices of red shining still where the setting sun hasn’t yet dragged all of it away. The ground cracks under his feet and crunches in the way dead, dry things do. He scatters smooth, time-worn white pebbles with the crown of his shoe. They skitter over each other and fall about in patterns that look a bit like half-formed words, things unsaid.

It’s only when he gets to the road that he even realizes where he is.

 _The Barking Deer_ is two floors tall and has got a look to it that suggests to the world that this place has been to Hell and back. It has weathered, brittle wooden cages swinging from the rafters out front that might have held brassy bright parrots, and husks of old charms and ristras.  Shuttered windows and felted tables, half of the shingles missing, peeling paint and a strange old shrine out on the yard that once probably held Plastic Mary and Plastic Jesus amidst bunches of bright flowers. 

It’s the most beautiful thing he’s seen in a while.

Blake stands on the porch, looking out, her eyes widening when she sees him. Her dirty, straggly strawberry-blonde hair falls over one shoulder, and she looks half like she’s going to bolt _to_ him and half like she might want to run in the other direction.

And then she shouts: “I’ve been waiting all day for you to show!”

“What?”

“You won’t—you won’t believe what happened,” she says in a rush, when he finally walks up to her.

She takes him around the pub, to the back where she’s got lanky chickens in a pen and a mostly dried up well.

“There was this _sound_ ,” she explains, hurriedly, “and I came running out here. And it was just _there._ ”

Sam feels a smile pulling at the corners of his mouth.

The Triumph gleams in the sunlight.

He runs a hand over her side and the big bike purrs, lithe as a panther, and Sam touches his hand to the throttle, feeling the thrum of the dark monster ready to hit the road. Dark bird silhouettes rise past them to fly into the crimson eye of the sun.

“Will you come in?” Blake asks, hopefully. “I’m baking. Pie.”

Sam looks once at the road, stretching to the distance, his present and past and future. The sinking sun is behind them, painting the sky, bright with the promise of a cool night to follow. The road, mother to all the lost, seems to open her arms to him.

“Yeah, I could use some pie,” Sam says, and nothing contradicts him in his head, nothing mocks at him with the snide slyness of a presence unwanted, “I’ve got a long road ahead.”

_Fin._


End file.
